Read a Book in CW — CW Complete Trainer User Guide v3.0.35

7I Want to Read a Book in CW

Not a drill — you want to sit back and enjoy a long piece of text, played straight through in its original order, the way you'd read a book or a long article.

The single best way to build true Instant Character Recognition (ICR) with a book: turn the text display off entirely, don't write anything down, and just listen to the CW. If you can follow the story purely by ear, your ICR is solid.

Where to Go

Open Text & QSO Training from the launcher and use From File. Tap Pick a .txt file, choose your book or story from your device's Downloads folder, then choose Save as Story and give it a title. Long files are automatically split into segments of roughly 5,000 characters each, and My Stories tracks how far you've progressed in each segment — including a Resume chip so you can pick up exactly where you left off.

Preparing a Text File

The file must be plain text (a .txt file, plain ASCII/UTF-8 — not a .docx, .pdf, or e-book format).

A good source of free plain-text books is Project Gutenberg. On a book's page, choose the Plain Text UTF-8 format (not EPUB, Kindle, or HTML). Before loading the file into the app, delete Project Gutenberg's license/boilerplate text at the start and end of the file — it's not part of the book and would otherwise play as CW before (and after) the actual story.

Don't worry about stray curly quotes, em dashes, or accented characters in the downloaded file — if Basic Characters Only is on (the default), the app automatically converts them to plain equivalents (or drops anything left over) before playback. The license-text removal is a separate, manual step — that's ordinary English text, not a character-encoding issue, so the app won't strip it for you.

Settings to Review

Basic Characters Only (Browser Settings, on by default) — cleans up curly quotes, dashes, and accented characters from the text file automatically; see the tip above.
Exercise length doesn't apply to story segments — the General → Exercise length setting is skipped entirely for story playback, so there's nothing to configure here; the automatic ~5,000-character segmentation already keeps each session a manageable size.
Neither TTS nor HCB apply to story/file playback — both are skipped entirely for stories and files, the same as web articles; there's nothing to configure for either one here, regardless of the setting's value.
Text display mode — this is the one setting that genuinely controls what you see here. Full text at start if you're happy following along visually while you listen, or Chars as played / At text end to hide the text and force pure listening comprehension on real prose — see the tip above.
Don't write down what you hear. Follow and understand the story by ear as it plays — transcribing it defeats the point of listening practice.
Speed (WPM) / Farnsworth — set to whatever steady-state speed you can comfortably follow for an extended session; there's no need to push speed the way you would in a drill.

This is different from Word Training → From File, which shuffles a word list into random order — good for vocabulary drilling, not for reading a book. Use Text & QSO Training → From File whenever you want the original sequence preserved.