A few thoughts on building a terminal ePub reader with AI

I like to do things in the terminal. It has little to do with efficiency. It is more my obsession with fiddling with software, so I don't have to think about all the depressing things happening in the world.

One terminal program I tried is [epy](https://github.com/wustho/epy), an e-book reader. I quite liked its speed. But like many other open source projects, it stopped being maintained.

So last November (2025), when coding agents like Codex CLI and Claude Code got better, I started to port epy from Python to Rust. I thought it was a task for an afternoon. After all, how hard can it be to display text in a terminal?

It turns out that rendering EPUB correctly in a terminal is a messy business. The format was not designed to be displayed in a terminal at all. And for a reasonable reading experience, you have to solve the problem of navigating the book correctly, which the AI struggled with quite a bit. Instead of a few hours, the agents worked for days, adding more and more features, until I was comfortable sharing the project in February this year (2026).

It got five up-votes and eight stars on GitHub. Perhaps there is not enough interest in terminal-based EPUB readers. Perhaps there is a general dislike of AI-built software. But had this project been published a few years earlier, I doubt the interest would have been so little.

With the recent release of Claude Fable 5 and GPT Sol 5.6, I added quite a few more features. Yet I doubt it would get even five up-votes this time.

With the abundance of software comes the devaluation of software. "Why would I use this, when I can ask my agent to spit out something similar, but closer to my own likes and dislikes?" A thing anyone can have made at will is a thing nobody treasures.

Books may be an analogue, even before authors began publishing hundreds of AI-generated novels. I used to read a lot, sometimes two dozen books a year. I kept an eye on authors I liked and tracked what they were publishing. Then I realized there are already far more good books than I can read in this lifetime. So new books, even great ones, mean nothing to me anymore. It is not that the books got worse. It is that my time was always the scarce thing, and now I can see it.

If we are really seeing the dawn of AGI, perhaps humans have to reckon with this: when there are far more intellectual artifacts --- games, software, books, music, films --- than anyone could consume in a lifetime, what is the meaning of creating more?

But maybe the question is older than it looks. Seneca complained two thousand years ago that the abundance of books distracts. There was already more than one life could hold; only the speed is new. And nobody ever wrote to finish writing, or read to finish reading. I did not port epy because the world lacked an e-book reader. I ported it to have something to fiddle with --- an afternoon that became months. The worth of making was never in being consumed. If it keeps my mind off the depressing things happening in the world, that is meaning enough, five up-votes or none.