Show HN: A usable eBook reader inside a browser (azw3, mobi, ePub, pdf)
loudreader.com
loudreader.com
Made one that usable for daily use. Comments and suggestion welcome.
1. It initially defaults to showing two facing pages per screen, but the selector shows "Read a chapter as a long scrolled page" as selected. "Fit 2 page side by side in window" is the same and is presumably the actual default. Switching back to "long scrolled page" from that does do what you'd expect. This is fullscreen on a 1920x1080 desktop display.
2. I personally dislike side-by-side views - I find them distracting - but at this size the line length for "long scrolled page" is too long for readability. I'd prefer a "long scrolled page but with shorter lines and bigger margins" option, like Firefox's reader view.
Also, do I need to keep the screen open if I want to save my place in my book? It doesn't seem to save my book or my location when I reload the page.
I think we still need far more/better solutions in the open source e-reading space.
Under many circumstances, some I've been in, none of those are an option, and a browser is all you've got.
Do you know a good list of available readers? I still searching for the one which fit for me. This one could be a good candidate after some polish.
a) To save books in some place online like s3 or gdrive etc.
b) Allowing to use the "bookmark" feature across sessions.
My use case is that sometimes I am reading a EPUB and I have it in my tablet, but sometimes I have my computer, and othertimes I have my phone. Currently I have to download it 3 times to read it and remember the bookmark.
How far did you make it with this? S3 is tricky because they don't offer OAuth so the user basically has to generate an IAM user and access keys and paste them into your app. I'm currently exploring solutions to this problem.
What programming language did you use?
What was the harder part?
Which format was the hardest?
How long did it take you?
Maybe have to reconsider layout for big screens similar to mine. But browser resize is fine for now.
My ebook reader requirements:
- [ ] let me set colors for background and text. Extra points for saving more than two sets.
- [ ] let me choose my own font, regardless of what the book says. (Pallatino, or TeX Gyre Pagella, is my preference.)
- [x] let me set main font size
- [ ] let me set margins and line spacing
- [x] scroll by changing pages, not scrolling down a column. No animations.
- [x] must respond to keypresses for next page and previous page. Extra points for keys for table of contents and next/previous chapter.
- [x] footnote support
So by my standards, it's almost there. It would be nice if, after I turned a page or three, the icons retreated further, or at least did not overlap the text.
- [x] colors
- [x] Fonts
- [x] Font size
- [x] Margins/padding/spacing
- [x] Page scroll. no animations
- [x] Keyboard shortcuts
- [x] Footnotes
* Hovering over either button on the top right opens a menu. I'm pretty sure only the far right is supposed to.
* Needs an option to center the content for wide screens.
Have you considered adding support for loading files from the user's Google Drive/Dropbox/etc? It seems like many apps would benefit from this. I've been toying with the idea of writing a JS lib to provide a common interface to all the big ones, kind of like how rclone does for the command line but for frontend apps.
I've found that iBooks has a great display stylesheet for epub and what makes it great is the ratio of text size to whitespace. It also limits how wide text can get - no need to spread it across the whole page. You could probably double the size of your margins to improve this.
I am also not sure if Firefox is causing this, but inter-line distances do not seem to be consistent and that is very distracting as a reader.
In both browsers the next/prev page arrows are also weirdly off-center.
https://gitlab.com/wolfgang000/cloud-books/
If you want to take a look, the MVP is already functional(at leat the dropbox integration until google approves the google drive one) but I haven't made the landing page
In the native browser it lets me access local storage content.
Can't do that in Firefox Reality but the browser's screen size certainly makes Alice 10ft tall!!
Thanks for the Show and Tell
I like the idea, and it looked useful. Have never tried/seen it in meatspace though, so who knows.
Edit: Spelling.
Other than what you can do in browsers I recommend you check PC remote terminals like vSpatial or ImmersedVR which give you a VR office experience.
Good Luck (and watch this space ;}
Create a two-column two-language ebook reader of free and public domain works that happen to be available in translation, therefore in two languages. You could use volunteers or AI to sync up the two columns. Good for learning languages, you can buy such books of course, but having a massive pile of them in open source available free so you could choose a text that interested you, would be nice. Might be possible to do this for news stories too, now I think about it.
Might take very little "AI" or volunteer work, given that translators don't often break up sentences.
A side note if anyone is also security conscience. Over the years I have also grown wary whether safe to also download pdf's and open them with a pdf reader. Anyone know if there is a best practice how to trust the pdf when opening on your host machine, or what do you suggest?
ePub
Does anybody knows of any interesting UI that works for books? I've looked into interactive books but it's only fun for few pages and then it leans more toward annoying. Any suggestions?
Also, please block double tap/triple tap. They trigger zoom in, then it’s impossible to zoom out.
Make it two columns. one column, the left one is the original text. The right column is a paragraph aligned translation, paragraph by paragraph, using Google or Bing or any of those API.
So far I have found no e-reader software capable of doing this.
Aligning paragraphs in a translated copy would be more useful from a language learning perspective, though generally something beginners overvalue.
Side by side UI also limits you to larger displays unless you will settle for tiny text.
This is exactly the intended use.
ANY help when learning a new language is welcome. Also, the translation quality varies a lot between language pairs. Sometimes it is greatly improved just by removing English from the equation.
I remember they removed the epub reader when Edge chromium was released.
[1] https://forum.sumatrapdfreader.org/t/sumatrapdf-on-linux/135...
I would love to see all these (not just PDF) to come with the common browsers by default. It seems sad to me they don't. The only browser that actually took care was the old Edge. I was very disappointed they decided not to port this feature to the new Edge.