Underlined is the edition to read when retention is the goal and a lookup won't slow you down too much; glosses above is the edition for just getting through the book; linked suits a screen that can tap but not look things up. All three are the same blended book rendered three different ways, and the difference is not cosmetic — each asks something different of your memory. All three come from the same source — see Blended Books on Your E-Reader for what a blended book is and where the editions come from.
What each edition actually puts on the page#
A blended book replaces a share of the words in a text you already read with the language you are learning, chosen so the sentence around each one still carries the meaning. What changes between editions is how the original word behaves once it has been swapped in.
| Edition | What you see on the page | Needs a dictionary? | What it asks of you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Underlined | The blended word, underlined, with nothing else on the page — you look it up to see the original | Yes, CrossPoint's built-in lookup | Retrieve the meaning first, then check |
| Glosses above (ruby) | The original word printed in small type directly above the blended word | No | Read the meaning as you go, no detour |
| Linked | The blended word is a link that jumps to a glossary at the end of the chapter | No | Follow the link, read the meaning, jump back |
On a CrossPoint reader, looking up an underlined word shows the word it replaced and its base form, drawn from the blend itself rather than a dictionary's most common sense — the full setup for that is in the CrossPoint step-by-step guide. Glosses above needs nothing extra: ruby rendering is part of the EPUB format itself, supported by most modern EPUB renderers (we are not promising yours is one of them — more on that below). Linked needs a screen you can tap, so it fits a phone or tablet reading app better than a button-only e-ink device. On the website, the underlined edition is what the main download button gives you; the other two sit under "Other editions." A book you blend yourself on Pro comes as the underlined edition with its own dictionary — see blending a whole book of your own — so the comparison below is mostly about the free library, and about whether your reader can do the lookup at all.
The learning rationale, condition by condition#
Underlined is a retrieval test disguised as a sentence. You read the surrounding context, form a guess at what the blended word means, and only then confirm it by looking it up. That sequence — guess, then check — is what the testing effect describes: retrieving an answer from memory, even an imperfect one, strengthens that memory more than being shown the answer and rereading it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Robert Bjork's framing of "desirable difficulties" makes the same point from the other direction: conditions that slow you down a little, rather than making reading effortless, are often the ones that produce better long-term retention — provided the difficulty is small enough that you can still push through it. It's the same logic behind why spaced repetition spaces reviews out instead of letting you reread a word the moment after you saw it.
Glosses above removes that difficulty on purpose. The original word is printed right there, so there is no guess to make and no lookup to interrupt the sentence. That is not a design shortcut without evidence behind it: L1 glosses placed next to unfamiliar words in a reading text have been shown to produce measurable incidental vocabulary learning compared to no gloss at all (Hulstijn, Hollander & Greidanus, 1996) — glossing does not block learning, it just asks less of you per word. It is also the only edition built for comprehension first: if you are below the roughly 98% coverage threshold that research associates with comfortable reading (Nation, 2006), every additional word that needs active resolution is a cost, and glosses above is the edition that keeps that cost near zero.
Linked is the middle condition in practice, not in theory: you still have to notice the link, decide to follow it, read the gloss, and find your place again, which is more effort than glosses above but less of a pure retrieval test than underlined, since the glossary entry is sitting one tap away rather than behind an active lookup.
Which edition fits your situation#
Level, device, and what you actually want out of the session point to different answers.
| Your situation | Read this edition | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Beginner, early in a language, any device | Glosses above | Lowest friction; keeps comprehension above the threshold where reading stays pleasant |
| You own a CrossPoint reader and want the words to stick | Underlined | You commit to a guess before you see the answer — the condition retrieval-practice research favors for long-term retention |
| Reading on a phone app, Kobo, PocketBook, or Boox, no CrossPoint | Glosses above or linked | Underlined's lookup depends on CrossPoint's dictionary; see the e-reader page for what works where |
| Rereading a book you already finished once | Underlined | You already have the gist, so the retrieval cost is lower and the benefit is higher |
| You just want to finish the story this week | Glosses above | Fewest interruptions between you and the next page |
| A long or demanding text, any level | Glosses above first, underlined for a reread | Protects comprehension on the first pass; adds difficulty once the plot is no longer competing for attention |
A sensible progression: glosses above, then underlined#
If you are choosing between editions for the same book rather than for your whole reading life, start with glosses above. It gets you through the text without comprehension collapsing every time an unfamiliar word appears, which matters most early in a book when you have not yet met any of its blended vocabulary. Once you are comfortable enough that stopping to check a word does not break your concentration — often somewhere in the second half, or on a book you are reading a second time — switch to underlined for the same text, or pick it by default for your next one. You are not discarding what the first pass taught you; you are adding the retrieval step once it is cheap enough to be worth paying. Downloading blended books with OPDS covers the mechanics of getting either one onto a reader.
What the research doesn't tell us#
Be honest about the gap here: the studies behind this post measured glossing and retrieval practice with L1 glosses in print and on-screen reading, not with an e-ink reader, not with a tap-to-look-up dictionary, and not with a word that was swapped into a sentence rather than appearing there naturally. We are applying a well-supported general principle — retrieval beats a pre-answered gloss, a gloss beats nothing — to a new reading format, not citing a study that tested blended books on e-ink specifically. Screen versus paper reading research covers what is and isn't established about reading on a device at all; the edition choice in this post is a layer on top of that, grounded in the same caution.
Where each edition stops working#
Underlined is the only edition that depends on anything beyond the EPUB file itself: it needs CrossPoint with the right companion dictionary active, and the reader only knows one dictionary's words at a time, so looking up an ordinary word outside that book says "not found" until you switch back. Glosses above needs no dictionary, but we cannot promise your reader or app renders ruby text correctly — support varies, and if the small type above a word looks wrong, that's the reader, not the file. Linked assumes you can follow a link easily, which is a touch screen in practice; on a button-only reader it is at best awkward, and we have not tested it there. None of the three is the "complete" edition; each trades something for something else.
The takeaway#
The three editions are three bets about what helps you remember more: make you retrieve it, hand it to you, or put a short detour between the two. Pick underlined for the friction and the retention; pick glosses above for the smoothest path through the book; pick linked when your device can tap but not look things up. Either way it's the same blended book — only the memory you build along the way changes.