Book Condenser produces a shortened reading edition of a nonfiction book. Its premise is narrow. The goal is to read less of the book without replacing the book with a summary. Rather than asking a model to rewrite the content, it identifies and keeps, word for word, the passages needed to preserve the central question, thesis, key terms, argument, evidence, and conclusion.
What it does
- Extractive, not generative. Retained text stays word for word from the source. The model decides what to keep, not how to phrase it.
- Argument-driven selection. Passages are chosen against an analytical map of the book, and essential propositions are kept together with their supporting evidence.
- Disclosed transitions. When a bridge is needed for continuity, it is italicized and labelled, and it is never presented as the author’s prose.
- Traceable output. It renders a tablet-optimized PDF (plus Markdown and optional DOCX) with omission markers, and produces audit artifacts documenting the selection decisions.
It accepts EPUB, PDF, DOCX, TXT, and Markdown, with configurable target length ratios reported against retained source words only.
The code is at github.com/khalidlabs/book-condenser.