LectorOctober 2026

Write it.
Hear it back.

Lector is a writing environment with read-aloud built in. Write your draft, then hear it sentence by sentence. The voice catches what the eye skips over. Completely local, with no cloud and no subscription.

Every writer knows the feeling. You read a paragraph three times and it looks fine. Then you hear it read aloud and immediately catch the sentence that runs too long, the word that appears twice in four lines, the transition that doesn’t quite land. That is a prose problem rather than a grammar problem, and the eye misses it because the brain already knows what you meant to say.

Hearing your writing is different, because the voice does not know what you intended and reads only what is there.

A second pass, through a different sense.

Lector puts read-aloud inside the writing environment itself, so there is no copying text into another application and no switching tools mid-edit. You write, you listen, and you revise in the same place.

The editor is distraction-free. It shows a formatted view or the raw Markdown source, and you switch between them without losing your place. Nothing else is on screen.

Read-aloud uses your system’s built-in voices today, and a set of offline neural voices (Kokoro) follows as a free update. The mechanic is mundane; the effect is a second editor who has never seen your draft.

The voice does not know what you intended. It reads what is actually there.

The library, encrypted before it lands.

Local-first is half the privacy story. The other half is what sits on disk after you close the editor. The encrypted library is in development and is not in the current beta build; this is its design. Lector’s library will write documents to disk as age v1 ciphertext under a key only your operating system knows about, with plaintext export one click away when you want it.

The encryption is age v1 with X25519 keys and ChaCha20-Poly1305 ciphers. The plaintext document never sits in the library directory, even briefly: a scratch directory mediates encrypt and decrypt and is swept on every Lector startup. The X25519 secret key lives in the Windows Credential Manager, per user and locked to your login, where we never see it and never sync it.

Plaintext export will be per document rather than a global toggle: encrypt for archival, plain for sharing or backup. Recovery without Lector is part of the design. A free, MIT-licensed companion decrypter will open any library file using your stored key, on a fresh machine, after uninstall, or for bulk export. (The decrypter formerly introduced as Resero continues under a new name; Resero is now the SIM DAD workbench.)

A substantiation paper covering the methodology, threat model and full source of the encryption module will be published against the shipping build.

You already know how to edit. Lector gives you a second pass through a different sense.

One price, paid once.

Lector is in private beta. Ask for beta access to try it now, or join the waitlist below and we will notify you when it ships. The launch price is $29, one-time, for up to three devices. No subscription, no telemetry, and no account required. Lifetime updates for v1.x.

Alex P. Leith
Personal license
$29
  • One-time
  • up to 3 devices
  • no subscription
  • lifetime updates for v1.x
  • Distraction-free Markdown editor
  • system voices now, offline neural voices (Kokoro) as a free update
  • encrypted library in development
  • 100% local
  • Windows and macOS.

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Join the waitlist and we will notify you the moment Lector is ready. No drip campaigns and no newsletters: one email when it is ready.

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Open source software

Lector is a commercial product built on open source software. We gratefully acknowledge the following projects and their contributors.

The practice behind the software

We built this for our own work first.

Lector exists because drafting long documents in Markdown, day after day, wore through the editors we tried.

SIM DAD LLC is a communication consulting practice led by Dr. Alex P. Leith. We audit and strengthen external communications, design and run studies, collaborate on federal and foundation grants, and deliver workshops. The software comes out of that work rather than the other way round.

If it is the methods you need rather than the tool, see what the practice does or start a conversation.