Monocle brings a silky e-reader experience to your browser or smartphone for free

Inventive Labs have just announced the launch of Monocle, a free browser-based e-reader that's just as impressive on a mobile browser as it is a desktop PC.

Open-sourced under the MIT licence, anyone with some basic HTML knowledge and access to a few EPUB files can embed a book on their website. The reading experience can then be customised to be as simple or fully featured as you want, with page turning swipe controls or fully-fleged bookmark and chapter search functions.

"We're concerned that the current ebook landscape is dominated by large companies trying to lock publishers, authors and readers into their devices and distribution models", Monocle's Jospeh Perason said. "We suspect this might be good for those companies, but no good for everyone else. There's a need to open up these fields to smaller players, and to give the consumer -- the person who loves to read books and to 'have' books -- better choices."

Click here to find out more about Monocle, or here to try it out with a copy of James Joyce's "Dubliners" for yourself.