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Comment by raskelll | Hacker News Reader

While I think it does look good and seems to have a wide range of features supported right out of the box, what new does it bring to the table?

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Isn't being cross-platform, relatively modern-looking and open source already setting it apart from the current offerings?

There's great ones (like Foliate or Moon+) which are limited to one platform, there's ones that are cross-platform, but look so dated that I couldn't seriously use them for reading (like the one integrated in Calibre), and there's ones which are both fairly modern-looking and cross-platform, but not open source (like FBReader).

If this one syncs my books, reading positions, and highlights across my devices, that's gonna be a huge win in my book.

Hmm, that is odd about fbreader. I have the Debian package¹ installed that is Open Source², but looks like recent versions are no longer Open Source. Hadn't noticed that before.

Might also argue that nov.el³ is high quality and cross platform, but I'm not sure my definition of cross platform would necessarily align with other peoples ;)

¹ https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fbreader

² https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/f/fb...

³ https://depp.brause.cc/nov.el

I don’t see how an ebook reader can look “dated”. It’s literally displaying your text, with your chosen font in a frame.

That's perfectly okay that you cant see how it could look dated. If you wish to have a productive conversation you should probably open your eyes and look a bit broader, perhaps by not minimizing things to their absolute minimum and thinking about that. you reduce the entire UI/UX as "in a frame" because the rest of it is about the actual content and font, which are literally the most basic need that the rest of the discussion is what actually matters

The ebook reader on calibre is literally a frame with almost no border. There is nothing to discuss regarding UI/UX. There is nothing extraneous. You can’t even see the frame if you go full screen.

Unintuitive toolbars, takes an unnecessary amount of clicks to simply highlight a sentence, and resizing the window or moving it to a different screen reflows the content unintuitively.

Like everything else in Calibre, it has all the features I want to have and then some, but actually using them is always just a little bit more complicated than it needs to be.

It's on JavaScript.

It does support multiple platforms. Even though I love Calibre, I'd love to use a better looking ebook Reader on desktop.

So just to play devil's advocate: is it really that much more work to build something entirely new in Tauri than to just do the porting work for releasing a GTK app on Windows/macOS?

I know it's annoying but it's not like it's impossible, right?

It's really easy to build wrapper apps based around good available libraries in tauri.

That doesn’t answer my question at all.

What exactly is so hard about porting the existing GTK app? That work already exists, anything in Tauri is reinventing the wheel.

Calibre is like the mupdf of epub

mupdf is the mupdf of epub; it supports epub and other formats beyond pdf¹. When I've had really large files I've used mupdf to read them a few times, as it seems to be far better at handling them than other tools.

¹ https://mupdf.com/

Is it multi platform though? It seems like the platform is Chromium.

*Webview

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