Blending a whole book for your e-reader means picking a source text on your readers page, telling LingoBlend which language to blend into and how much, and waiting a few minutes for a complete blended book with its own companion dictionary — a Pro feature that works the same way a blended article does, just at the length of a novel.
This is the part that is entirely yours: not a fixed library title, but any public-domain classic that fits, or a text you paste in yourself. The book is an ordinary EPUB, so it opens on any reader; a paired CrossPoint reader just saves you the copying. If blended books are new to you, Blended Books on Your E-Reader covers the free library, the companion dictionary and clipping before you spend any of your allowance here.
The flow, start to finish#
Everything happens on your readers page once you are signed in:
- Pick a source. Choose one of the public-domain classics listed below, or switch to My own text and paste in anywhere from 200 to 60,000 words. (Paste mode also asks for a title and the language the text is written in.)
- Choose a target language. Any of LingoBlend's 17 languages.
- Choose a percentage. A slider from 5% to 50%, in steps of 5, defaulting to 20%.
- Check the cost, then start. The page shows the exact word cost against your remaining Smart Blend balance before the button enables. If the book doesn't fit your remaining allowance, it tells you before anything is spent.
- Wait, or walk away. It takes a few minutes. You can close the page and come back — it keeps working in the background. Only one book runs at a time.
- Get your book. A blended EPUB and its matching dictionary, ready to read on any EPUB app — or to pull onto a paired CrossPoint reader, or copy over by USB.
That's the whole interaction. No chapter picker, no file upload for this path — just a source, a language, and a percentage.
Which classics are ready today#
The library on your readers page only offers titles short enough to fit comfortably inside a single blend. Here's what's available right now:
| Book | Language | Words in the source text |
|---|---|---|
| The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman) | English | 6,085 |
| Die Verwandlung (Kafka) | German | 19,325 |
| Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous) | Spanish | 20,076 |
| Candide (Voltaire) | French | 33,665 |
| Le avventure di Pinocchio (Collodi) | Italian | 39,894 |
| The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) | English | 48,208 |
A handful of longer classics — O Alienista, Der Prozess, La Divina Commedia: Inferno, Les Misérables (Tome I), Dom Casmurro, Pride and Prejudice, and Don Quijote de la Mancha — exceed the 60,000-word per-book limit, so the picker lists them separately rather than offering them. We're not promising when or whether that changes; the list will change as that limit does.
If none of these fit what you want to read, paste your own text instead — anything from a short story to a long essay, as long as it's between 200 and 60,000 words and something you have the right to use (public domain, or text you wrote or otherwise have permission to blend).
The language rule: read the book, learn the blend#
This is the one setting worth stopping on before you click anything. The book's language should be one you already read. The dictionary explains every blended word in the book's own language, not in your target language — so a German book blended into Spanish is built for someone who reads German and is learning Spanish, not the other way around.
Concretely: if your known language is English and you're learning Spanish, you'd pick an English book (say, The Great Gatsby) and blend Spanish words into it. Picking a German book and blending Spanish into it only works if German is the language you read — the dictionary explains every blended word in German, and a German gloss is no help to someone who does not read German.
The form defaults to your known language for exactly this reason, and it warns you before you change it to something else. If you ever see that warning, it's not a glitch — it's the one place in this flow where getting it backwards wastes the whole book.
How much to blend#
The percentage slider runs from 5% to 50%, in steps of 5, with 20% as the default — about one word in five, the same share the ready-made library books use. At that setting, you'll meet new vocabulary often enough to make progress without losing the thread of the story.
Push it higher (up to the 50% ceiling) for immersion once you know a book well, or keep it low for a first pass through something dense. There's no single right answer — and whatever percentage you pick, the words chosen inside it are matched to your level, just as they are for any blend, now applied to a whole book instead of one article.
Personalized exactly like any other blend#
A whole-book blend isn't a separate, simpler engine — it's the same selection logic that powers every blend in the app, run once across the entire text. It skips words you've already mastered in any inflected form, prefers new words that connect to vocabulary you already know, and targets your level throughout. Because the whole book is selected against one snapshot of your vocabulary, a word doesn't flip from "mastered" in chapter one to "new" in chapter nine — the book stays internally consistent in a way a chapter-by-chapter approach couldn't guarantee. If you haven't set up personalized blending yet, a day or two of saved words and practice games before you blend a book is worth the wait.
The quota, honestly#
Blending a whole book draws on the same 100,000 Smart Blend words per month that Pro gives you in the app — there's no separate allowance for books. A 48,208-word novel costs 48,208 words — the whole text is read, whatever percentage you pick — so a single long classic is roughly half your month. That is why your readers page shows the exact word cost and your remaining balance before the button enables. If a book doesn't fit what you have left this month, it's refused up front, not partway through. Free accounts don't get this feature at all; they get 3 Smart Blends a month in the app and unlimited Basic Blends, same as always. Whole-book blending is Pro only (€4.99/month or €49.99/year).
What you get, and two ways to read it#
Every finished job gives you two files: the blended EPUB and its companion dictionary, generated from the exact blend so every definition matches the sense the book actually used. A short preface page at the front of the book carries the on-device instructions, so you're not hunting for a help article once it's already on your reader.
| If you have | What to do |
|---|---|
| A paired CrossPoint reader (1.7 or a Nightly build) | The book downloads itself over WiFi from the LingoBlend plugin's list; its dictionary comes from LingoBlend Dictionaries → My dictionaries |
| No paired reader | Download the EPUB and the dictionary zip from the website — the links are short-lived, but you can request fresh ones any time |
If you have a CrossPoint reader on 1.7 or a Nightly build, pairing it on your readers page takes a minute, and every book you blend afterwards appears in the LingoBlend plugin's list on the device, one tap from downloading. On 1.6.x you copy both files over USB instead — see the limitations below. If you'd rather try the whole loop before spending a chunk of your monthly allowance on a Pro blend, downloading a ready-made book from the free library over OPDS uses the exact same dictionary setup. And once you're reading on the device, words you clip — from a blend you made or from the free library — sync back into your account the same way either time.
What this doesn't do yet#
Worth saying plainly: this is text in, book out — there's no EPUB or PDF upload for this job yet, so you can't hand it an ebook file you already own and get a blended version back. There's also no chapter-range option for the longer classics; a book either fits inside the 200–60,000-word window whole, or it waits on the list above until that limit changes. And only one book runs at a time per account, so if you're blending something long, queue up what you want to read next rather than starting several at once. The on-device half of all this — pairing, the plugin list, Clip — needs CrossPoint 1.7 or a Nightly build; on 1.6.x you copy the EPUB and dictionary over USB instead.
None of that makes the feature less useful for what it does today — turning a classic or your own text into a full, personalized, dictionary-backed book — but it's worth knowing before you plan an afternoon around uploading a novel you already have.
The takeaway#
Whole-book blending turns the same personalized selection behind every LingoBlend text loose on something long enough to actually live with for a few weeks — a classic you pick, or your own text, in the language you're learning, built around the words you already know. It's Pro, it's one book at a time, and it's honest about its own word-count and allowance limits. For the library of ready-made books that need no account at all, start at the e-reader page.