Practice Typing With Books, and Actually Keep Your Place

Typing your way through a book is practice that doubles as reading: instead of shuffled words, you retype a text somebody actually wrote. Mochi Type ships with built-in books, imports your own, and — the part most tools skip — keeps a bookmark, so tomorrow starts where you stopped tonight. Here is how that works, what is in the built-in library, and where its limits are.

The one thing the market does not give you

Search for typing practice with books and the results are all websites, all first-party, all good at the thing they advertise. TypeLit offers to let you retype entire books. TypersGuild advertises 100+ classic books, 10M+ words to type, 50+ authors. TypeQuicker has a books section. They work in a browser tab, on any machine, and they are free to start.

There is one axis on which all of them are the same, and it is the one that decides whether you finish anything.

On Hacker News in January 2023, in a thread about typing practice, somebody put the appeal in one line: “I like typelit.io as I can read books at the same time.” That is the whole pitch, and it is a good one. Reading and drilling at once, on prose worth reading.

Now the gap. keybr — one of the best-known in the category, and a genuinely well-made one — can practise on book paragraphs. What it does not do is remember which paragraph you were on. People have been asking for exactly that since October 2023: the request is an open ticket with nine reactions from others who wanted it, and someone got tired of waiting and filed it again in April 2026. Both are still open today. The ticket numbers, if you want to look them up, are in the FAQ below.

Nearly three years, a leader in the category, and a request nobody has argued against — that is not a company being lazy. It is a hint about what is cheap on a website and what is not. A bookmark means per-user state, which means an account, a database and a bill every month for storing the fact that you are on page eleven.

Two things this page is not going to claim, because they would be false. keybr can practise on text you supply — it has a Custom Text option, and “keybr does not do custom books” is a thing people repeat that is not true. And the sites above are better than any Mac app at breadth, immediacy and price. If you want to open a browser and be typing Dracula ninety seconds from now, use TypeLit. That is a real recommendation, not a courtesy.

The narrow, checkable claim is the one worth building on: on a website, your place in the book is somebody else’s running cost. On your own machine, it is a number in a file.

What a reading position looks like when it exists

Here is the concrete version, because “remembers your place” is another phrase that costs nothing to write.

In Mochi Type every text has a Reading Position section, and it is always visible — an untouched book reads 0 of 19,095 words rather than showing nothing at all. Above it a progress bar, beside the heading a percentage, and on the same line as the word count a Reset Position button, greyed out until there is something to reset.

Below that, three radio buttons deciding where the next session starts:

Start position	What the next session does
Resume where I left off	Picks up at the bookmark
Always from the beginning	Ignores the bookmark, restarts at word one
Random paragraph	Re-deals the whole book as shuffled paragraphs

Only the first is free. Clicking either of the others on the free tier opens the unlock window instead of switching. That is worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind a lock icon, which the app deliberately does not draw.

Random paragraph is not what its name suggests, and the distinction matters if you are choosing it. It does not drop you at a random point and continue from there. It shuffles: the book is split at paragraph boundaries, the paragraphs are re-dealt in random order, and the words inside each paragraph are untouched. Every regeneration is a fresh deal. It exists for the drill material rather than the reading material — the verb workbooks ship with it as their default start mode, because working through a verb list alphabetically for the fifth time is worse practice than a shuffled deck. On the free tier that default is stored but does not act: every text, workbooks included, runs in Resume until you unlock.

The bookmark itself moves on words you actually typed, not words the app put on screen. Type half of what it showed you and the position advances by half. It also refuses to go backwards on its own: a session that starts a couple of lines rewound cannot drag your place back with it. Two things move it backwards, and both are things you asked for — the Reset Position button, and starting a text you had already finished, which restarts the count honestly rather than leaving you at 100 percent forever.

Sessions with no timer, and records that survive them

A typing test is sixty seconds because a test needs to be comparable. Reading is not a test, and a sixty-second ceiling is the wrong shape for a book — you spend the session getting into the prose and then it stops.

Practice in Mochi Type offers 15, 30, 60 and 120 seconds, and, while a custom text is selected, an unlimited option as well. Unlimited is not offered on the built-in word sets, and selecting one while it is active drops you back to your last timed choice, so the selector never shows an option it cannot honour. It counts up rather than down and ends when you press Escape, or when the book runs out.

Two details make long sessions safe rather than merely possible.

The position saves itself every thirty seconds while an unlimited session runs. That is the difference between an hour of reading and an hour of reading you can afford to lose. A timed session persists at the end; an unlimited one has no end to persist at, so it checkpoints as it goes.

A long session cannot damage your records. Personal bests are bucketed by target duration — your 15-second best, your 30-second best, your 60 and your 120 are four separate numbers that never meet. An unlimited run is stored with a target duration of zero, which makes it a bucket of its own. Two hours of Chekhov at a comfortable reading pace is filed against other unlimited runs and nowhere near your 60-second record. You can slow down and read properly without paying for it on a leaderboard.

That is the actual reason to want a timer-free mode. Not endurance. Permission to stop performing.

What is actually in the library, counted

Twenty books ship inside the app. Five each for English, German, Russian and Ukrainian, and only the set for the language you are currently practising gets seeded — the app writes five books to disk, not twenty.

Every set has the same shape: a verb workbook, a travel phrasebook, a Python syntax workbook, the Gospel of John, and one work of literature.

Read that list again, because it settles what this library is and is not. Three of the five are drills. The reading is the remaining two — and there is no novel among any of them. The literature slots are Grimms Märchen in German, Chekhov’s short stories in Russian, Ivan Franko’s tales in Ukrainian, and, in English, America’s Founding Documents, which is a fine thing to type and is not fiction at all.

The provenance is written down rather than implied, which is more than the sites with fifty-plus authors bother with. The English Gospel is the King James; the German, the Lutherbibel 1912; the Russian, the Синодальный перевод of 1876; the Ukrainian, Kulish’s 1871 New Testament, with its кулішівка spelling left alone. Grimms Märchen is the 1857 Ausgabe letzter Hand. The Franko is from the 1956–62 collected works, volume 7. All public domain, and where the source is historical the historical orthography is kept rather than modernised — a nineteenth-century text typed as a nineteenth-century text.

The sizes, measured on the source files:

Book	Words
Grimms Märchen (German)	31,346
Казки Івана Франка (Ukrainian)	30,852
Рассказы Чехова (Russian)	19,800
The Gospel of John, KJV (English)	19,095
America’s Founding Documents (English)	8,909
English Irregular Verbs	7,280
English Travel Phrasebook	6,997

The other three translations of John run from 14,478 words to 18,102. Every remaining workbook and phrasebook sits between about 6,700 and 8,200. Around 246,000 words across all twenty. Against TypersGuild’s advertised ten million, that is roughly forty times less, and no arrangement of the numbers makes it look otherwise.

The books are free of the free tier’s slot limit — they never count against the two texts of your own it allows — but they are not free of its word ceiling. Every text stops at its first 1,000 words until you unlock, bundled books included: you type up to the wall, the app shows a greyed, untypeable preview of what comes next, and that is the paywall. A thousand words of the Gospel of John is about five percent of it. Enough to know whether you like typing this way; not enough to finish anything.

One behaviour to know before it surprises you. Switch your practice language and the five books of the language you left are deleted from disk, if you never opened them. Open even one and the whole set is protected — so is one you renamed, or reordered — so a person who practises in two languages ends up keeping both sets, ten books. And because each book’s identity is derived rather than random, going back to that language reseeds exactly the same five with the same identities, so a set that syncs from another Mac reconciles to one copy instead of two. Deleting a book yourself is the one irreversible move: it leaves a tombstone, and that book never comes back on its own.

Where your book goes if you leave iCloud on

The books ship inside the app, so reading them needs no network at all. The only request the app’s own code makes is one screenshot, fetched when you press a preview button in the What’s New window. Apple’s own frameworks — StoreKit, and CloudKit when sync is on — make their calls separately, which the offline audit guide takes apart properly, checks included.

The word “offline” still needs a qualification, and it is a real one.

On a Mac signed into iCloud, sync starts switched on, and a book you imported syncs as its full text, not as a title and a page number. The destination is your own private CloudKit database — private to your Apple Account, unreadable by me, and, in the words of the app’s own Settings help text, it “doesn’t count against iCloud Drive space”. Two named zones do the work, MochiSessions for the history and MochiCustomTexts for the library, which is the level of detail worth having if you care where a manuscript ended up.

Private is not local, though, and that is the qualification. Something left the Mac. The switch is in Settings → Backup, and the offline audit guide covers turning it off and what replaces it.

The bundled twenty are mostly unaffected. They live in the app bundle, identical on every Mac, so reading one pushes nothing, and even dragging them into a different order is deliberately kept off the wire — the other Mac derives the same order from the same bundle. Renaming one is the exception worth knowing: a name change rides the same record that carries the body, so that book uploads. Otherwise it is the texts you brought that travel.

Choosing, honestly

Use a website if you want to start now, on any machine, for nothing, with a hundred books to pick from. TypeLit and TypersGuild do that well and a Mac app cannot match the catalogue. Accept that your place in the book may not be there tomorrow.

Use keybr if what you want is the drill rather than the reading — its per-letter adaptivity is the best thing in the category, it takes custom text, and the position is the one thing it will not keep.

Use a Mac app if you intend to finish something. That is the whole of the argument: bookmark on your own disk, sessions with no clock, no account, and a book that works on a plane.

Mochi Type is my answer to the third case, and I have already said where it loses. Twenty bundled books against a hundred, no novel among them, 1,000 words per text before it asks for $12.99 once, macOS 14.6 or later, and no phone version at all. What it does that the tab cannot: 0 of 19,095 words sitting there when you come back on Thursday, a session that runs as long as you feel like reading, and a position saved every thirty seconds so a long one is never a risk.

For a real novel you bring your own file, and that is a separate matter of formats, cleanup and what survives the import — EPUB and plain text go in, and the page behind that link is where the details live.

The test I would apply to any tool here is small and takes two days. Type a few hundred words of something. Close it. Come back tomorrow and see where it puts you. Everything else on the feature list is negotiable; that one is the difference between practising with a book and practising with the first page of a book.