For language teachers
Assign real literature. Stop curating textbook excerpts.
Free bilingual classics your students can read in the browser. Sentence-aligned so a mixed-ability class can all read the same novel — your strongest readers stay in the target language, your weakest don't drown. No accounts required. No per-seat fees.
Full novels, not snippets.
Set Madame Bovary, The Trial, or Don Quixote as the term's reading instead of a four-page anthology extract. The whole arc — and the language that earns the canon — comes with it.
Sentence alignment levels the class.
A mixed-ability set can all read the same chapter. Stronger readers stay in the target language; weaker readers glance at the parallel sentence and stay in the story instead of stalling on a single clause.
Students self-serve grammar questions.
AI sentence explanations answer the why questions — the subjunctive, the idiom, the cultural reference — that used to fill your inbox at 11pm the night before class.
Set texts your curriculum already expects
AP / A-Level French
Flaubert, Maupassant, Camus selections — paired with English at sentence level.
GCSE / AP Spanish
Borges, Cervantes, García Lorca — full texts rather than the textbook excerpts.
AP / A-Level German
Kafka, Goethe, Hesse — useful for Goethe-Zertifikat preparation as well.
IB Literature
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pirandello, Pessoa — works across the IB world-literature reading lists.
The library is public-domain only today; a missing set text is usually a few weeks away if it's out of copyright. Email and we'll prioritise it.
How teachers use Babelotheca
Whole-class reading
Set a chapter a week. The class meets to discuss the original-language text; struggling students arrive having actually finished the reading, not given up after page two.
Differentiated homework
Same novel, three different worksheets. Stronger students answer questions about the source-language passage; weaker ones can lean on the parallel sentence to keep up.
Exam set texts
Send students the bilingual EPUB to load on a Kindle for revision. They re-read the source language with the safety net of an aligned translation when memory fades.
Coming for teachers
Class dashboards, progress tracking, bulk access.
See what your class has read, where they're stuck, and which sentences they've asked the AI tutor about. Not built yet — your feedback decides what ships first. Drop your email and we'll write back personally.
Common questions
Is it free for students?
Reading the library is free for everyone — students included. Each book is also free to export as a bilingual EPUB or PDF, which means no per-seat fees and no school IT procurement. The optional subscription (sentence-level AI explanations, offline reading, document upload) is paid by individual students who want it.
Do students need to create an account?
Not to read. They can open any book, switch languages, and export the bilingual EPUB or PDF without signing up. Accounts only become useful when a student wants their reading progress synced across devices.
Which exam boards and curricula does the library cover?
The library leans toward canonical writers — Goethe, Flaubert, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Kafka, Borges — which overlaps heavily with AP, IB, A-Level, GCSE, and Goethe-Zertifikat reading lists. If a specific set text is missing, email us; if it's in the public domain we'll usually add it within a few weeks.
Can I see what my class has read?
Class dashboards, progress tracking, and bulk access aren't built yet. Join the waitlist below and we'll email you when they're ready — your feedback shapes what gets built first.
What languages can I assign?
English paired with Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese, or Mandarin, plus a small number of cross-language pairs (e.g. Spanish↔French, Italian↔German). New pairs are added by request.
Are the texts genuinely sentence-aligned?
Yes — every book is run through an alignment pipeline and reviewed before it's added. That's the whole point: a weaker reader can lean on the parallel sentence, while a stronger reader can stay in the target language and only glance over for the rare hard idiom.
Have a look around the library before you decide.
Browse the library →