Docs › Writing Studio › The Showcase tab: your book as a 3D object you can leaf through
The Showcase tab: your book as a 3D object you can leaf through
Last updated September 10, 2026 · 9 min read
In one line: leaf through your own book in the bookshelf's Showcase tab, and give it a cover.
Why this exists
A word count will not make you want to keep writing, and neither will "thirty thousand to go". Seeing your book as a physical object — with thickness, with gilt on the cover, that opens — is a different feeling. What you wrote starts to look like a book.
Showcase has no practical function. It is there for you to look at.
Where it is
The tab row on your bookshelf: Projects · Archive · Showcase · Trash. The URL is ?tab=showcase, so you can bookmark it.
On the shelf are all the books in your Writing Studio, most recently edited first. Archived books are there too, bound as hardcovers so you can tell at a glance. Old Script Studio books are not shown. Neither is anything in the trash.
With no books yet, a translucent Your first book stands there with a Create a book button beside it. That ghost book does not open.
Turning the rail, opening a book
The book in the middle is in the centre position, one angled book sits on either side, and the rest are stacked at both ends showing only their spines.
| What you want | How |
|---|---|
| Bring another book to the centre | Horizontal scroll, a trackpad swipe, the left and right arrow keys, or just drag sideways |
| Focus a book at the side or in a spine stack | Click it |
| Open the centre book | Click it — a small slip reading Open appears beside your pointer |
| Go back one level | Esc |
The centre book tilts and lifts with your cursor and lets its cover fall ajar. On your first visit a line along the bottom says Pick a book and open it; it disappears for good once you interact with anything.
The detail panel
The spotlight panel, top to bottom
| Block | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Title and genre | The title, with the genre on the line below |
| Stats | Word count · N pages · Goal progress N% |
| Two buttons | Read this book (primary) / Keep writing |
| Front · Back | One row each, with Upload image / From book; a Remove appears once there is something to remove |
| Style | Default first, then nineteen swatches |
| Edges | Gilded / Silver / Plain |
"N days of writing" is not in this panel — it is printed on the 3D book's own belly band, next to the word count and the page count.
Clicking a book brings up what it knows about itself. On a phone or a narrow window this panel rises from the bottom instead.
Two buttons: Read this book (go in and leaf through) and Keep writing (straight to the editor).
You can also drag the book itself to turn it around and look at the back. Flick it hard and it spins a few times before settling onto the front or the back face.
Leafing through
Inside, the book opens as a two-page spread, and both leaves carry your actual manuscript.
- Turn a page — click the left half of the screen to go back, the right half to go forward; the scroll wheel and the arrow keys work too.
- Jump to a chapter — the dropdown in the top corner, one entry per manuscript file. It takes you to the spread that holds that chapter's first page.
- Leave — the control in the opposite corner.
When you reach the ribbon — where you are currently writing — or the last spread, To be continued — floats up along the bottom with a Back to writing button.
There is no single-page mode; a phone gets the spread as well. And on a phone you can only tap a half of the screen to turn a page — swiping does nothing. There is no zoom, no fullscreen and no page-turn sound.
Which files get printed
Manuscript files only: your text chapters, wherever they sit in the tree, in file-tree order, all of them, with no cap on the number. What decides it is the file's content type, not the folder it is in — in Ink Tide that happens to be everything under Chapters/.
Not printed: reference material such as Characters/, Locations/ and Worldbuilding/; the .map, .geomap, .timeline and .beats files; and .script screenplays. Structured files print as raw data, so the whole class is excluded.
The typesetting is real typesetting. Markdown syntax is stripped, images are dropped, code blocks are removed whole, and a link keeps only its text. Pages run title page → colophon → chapters → blank pages at the back, and the blanks are padded out to the page count your target word count works out to — so that stack of empties is "this much is still waiting for you". Page numbers only start at the first page of the body.
The page count in the panel, and the thickness of the book, are worked out from your word count and are held inside a range, so a very long book's spine stops getting thicker. The number of pages you can actually turn comes from the typesetter. The two will not match exactly, and that is expected.
Changing the cover
The panel has two rows, Front and Back, each with Upload image and From book.
- Upload image — pick an image file. Cropping is automatic: centred, cut to 2:3, re-encoded, and the camera metadata is dropped on the way through. There is no crop box for you to drag.
- From book — choose an image the book already contains. The original file is not touched.
- Remove only appears once there is something to remove.
A custom cover is stored as a hidden file inside the book, so it syncs and is versioned along with the book — open it on another machine and the cover is still there.
Styles and edges
The Style row starts with Default (colours drawn from the book's genre), then two families, nineteen in all:
- Thirteen art covers — Ink Line, Sword Stroke, Star Lattice, Star Castle, Contours, Jellyfish, Golden Steps, Red Threads, Labyrinth, Cherry Blossom, Royal Gilt, Baroque Noir, Wine Gilt.
- Six designed layouts — Classic Gilt, Editorial, Literati, Art Deco, Moonlight, Bauhaus.
Every swatch is painted live with your book's own title, so what you see is what you get. A book you have never styled is given one of the art covers automatically.
Edges is the gilding on the outside of the block: Gilded, Silver or Plain.
For a book that is past your plan's book limit and has gone read-only, the cover, style and edge area collapses to a single explanatory line. Reading and Keep writing still work — read-only locks writing, not looking.
What not to expect
Showcase cannot be shared or exported. There is no public link, no way to record the 3D book, and no way to save the cover as an image. It is you, looking at your own books. To show someone else, use a public share link.
If the browser has no WebGL, or it is switched off, the tab does not load the 3D at all and shows a line of explanation instead. There is no fallback wall of covers to browse.
Related
- Docs: Book list overview
- Docs: Book lifecycle: archive, trash, restore
- Docs: Manuscript vs reference
- Docs: Embedding images, PDFs and link previews
- Docs: Set writing goals
- Docs: Public read-only share link
Open the app and do this with your own book. Free to start, no credit card.