FAQ

The initial release of Parallel Books is for iOS (iPad, iPhone and iPod touch). Other platforms, including Android, are in development.

Parallel Books for Android is currently in development.

Currently iOS 8.3 and later are supported. A future release may provide further backward compatibility.

Books and translations are being added all the time. You can view what is currently available from within the app.

This information will also be added and synced to this website in the future.

Books and translations are being added all the time. You can view what is currently available from within the app.

This information will also be added and synced to this website in the future.

The app itself is currently localised to English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, although it is designed to be intuitive to use for speakers of any language. Note that the actual books are availble in additional languages.

In order to be able to page forward cleanly, the page must finish on a whole line. For this reason partial lines are faded out after scrolling.

Most content opens very quickly in Parallel Books. However for some very long content the app takes some time to calculate the chewing gum overlay when first opening. This will be optimised and sped up considerably in a future release.

The iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch versions of Parallel Books are mostly identical. The only differences are:

  • in the iPhone/iPod Touch version, due to screen size, only one book can be on screen when the device is in portrait. In landscape you can view either one or two books.
  • a couple of buttons are removed in portrait on the iPhone/iPod Touch, all buttons are visible in landscape.

The wording of the translation is up to the translator. Sometimes translations are almost word for word, but other times the translators have been more liberal. A given situation may not be best described in exactly the same way in both languages, or perhaps the a different choice of wrods just sounds better. These insights are one of the benefits of honing a language with Paralllel Books.