Waypoint Readers
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About · The method
How we make a graded reader.
Most "graded readers" sit somewhere between a textbook and a Wikipedia summary. Waypoint titles are written like books — by people who like books — but on rails that keep each one honest at its level. Here's the workflow that gets them there.
01
Start from the source.
Every Waypoint title begins as a public-domain novel — a book whose copyright has run, freeing us to retell it. We read the original end to end, mark the load-bearing scenes, and write a Story Bible that pins down characters, setting, and what each chapter has to accomplish.
02
Cap the vocabulary.
Each CEFR level has a hard vocabulary list — frequency-banded, hand-curated. A1 sits inside the most common ~500 Spanish words; A2 around ~1,500; B1 around ~3,000. The author drafts each chapter against the list. Anything outside it has to earn its place with a glossary entry.
03
Cap the grammar.
A1 is present-tense leaning; A2 introduces the past; B1 opens up the future, the perfect, and the subjunctive in measured doses. We check each chapter against a grammar window before it ships — if a structure isn't yet in-scope, the sentence is rewritten.
04
Illustrate every beat.
Painterly oil-style plates, one per body paragraph at A0–A1, three per chapter at higher levels. The art is generated from prompts pinned to the actual prose, so each image enacts what the reader is about to read.
05
Narrate it natively.
Every chapter ships with audio in a neutral LatAm Spanish voice. Tempo and tone are tuned per paragraph using a steering plan. A1 reads a touch slowly; B1 reads at conversational pace.
06
Ship as a book.
The final pack is a single EPUB (and audiobook M4B) the reader downloads to the Waypoint Reader app on iOS, iPad, Android, or the web. Yours forever. DRM-free. No subscription required to read what you've bought.
Proof, by the numbers
The levels actually mean something.
85%+ of each level's vocabulary is new vs. the rung below (pairwise glossary Jaccard 0.06–0.15). Unique word count roughly triples A1 → B2. A2 is the first rung where the narrative switches into the past. B1 is the first with full mainstream grammar — future, perfect, subjunctive.
A1
~500 words
Present
A2
~1,500 words
+ Past
B1
~3,000 words
+ Future, perfect, subj.
B2
~5,000 words
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Waypoint Readers
Classic adventure novels, carefully graded for Spanish learners. Madrid · 40° 25′ N · 3° 42′ W.
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