Merrilin - We built an app to read books

Trying to Read War and Peace

I have been trying to read War and Peace for years. I know nothing about Napoleonic history, but that didn’t keep me from enjoying The Count of Monte Cristo, which was one of my favourite books growing up. But War and Peace comes with some rather strange baggage.

I was always told it’s the book everyone gives up on.

I bought a copy in the early noughts. I tried to read 2 pages perhaps. I didn’t make much headway. There were other things to read.

I didn’t have this problem with Dostoevsky so it wasn’t a Russian Literature problem. I’ve read The Brothers Karamazov at 14, not sure how much of the philosophical diatribes into patricide I got, but it’s something.

I think I might have done better with War and Peace if I had cliff’s notes or something. Perhaps an annotated edition? I’m not sure. And I’ve not done well with annotated editions of other books either. I think it’s just a problem with knowing how to read some things.

Trying to Read War and Peace ft. LLMs

In June 2024, I tried something fun.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at this answer frankly. So I set myself to reading War and Peace with ChatGPT on the side.

I got about 4 chapters in, which was farther than I ever had until that point.

I began thinking then that there was something here.

Now I’d tried NotebookLM when it came out, and I haven’t been very happy with the experience. Both using ChatGPT and NotebookLM involved having to take my attention away from my reading app, and then having to constantly tell the models to not spoil me.

It’s funny though. Asking to not be spoiled about War and Peace? Imagine if someone didn’t want to be spoiled about Dracula!

Being Opinionated about Reading Apps

I own about 2500 books. My personal library keeps growing, but I predominantly read digitally nowadays. I own several reading devices, and even love reading on my phone, a OnePlus Open. I think reading on any device should be easy and it should get certain things right.

A reading app should:

1. sync your books, annotations (bookmarks, notes and highlights) and progress across books;
2. allow you to read on any device;
3. allow you to organize your library into collections in a meaningful way;
4. provide you a choice of themes that account for a variety of accessibility options;
5. have easy-to-discover menu options and not be a UI clusterf*ck;
6. provide accurate estimates of reading time; and, most importantly,
7. get out of your way and allow you to read.

You’d think that out of all the reading apps out there, one would meet these criteria. None do, really. I have tried them all. Sync is broken, or it is manual. And even if it works, you need to set up scripts to export stuff like highlights or, dear Vishnu in Vaikunta, write code to get it to work. And themes. As a developer, I have access to an insane number of themes that are optimized to naraka and back. Why on earth can’t reading apps give me those themes? It’s like the folks who write the reading apps do not use them.

And some of the apps are just plain bad. I haven’t seen some in ages, and I opened them specifically to research for this post, and they were just hideous.

I’m not being very nice here. And I don’t think I want to be. Reading is an important activity, especially in today’s world. They say don’t judge a book by its cover but bibliophiles do. I have strong opinions about which hardcovers to buy. I own multiple copies of the Lord of the Rings. I even want to get some pretty hardcovers which use a decently sized font for War and Peace.

It is abysmal that our reading apps are not that well made. Some are good. I’ve used them for years. But I’ve had separate apps for different styles of books. And sync has always been broken.

I even had to watch YouTube tutorials to get my head around one of them, and that forever had broken sync, and don’t even get me started about that travesty of a built-in keyboard. I stopped taking notes in my books!

I have always wanted to build a reading app. It’s not the fanciest of ideas, but it is deeply personal to me.

This idea began 2 years ago, when I tried to read War and Peace with ChatGPT. But it also began when dominant reading apps could not retain my attention. They all lacked something.

When @loststoic and I kept talking about “something to build” as a side project, even early in 2025, I always rounded myself towards “a reading app”.

The laundry list of features was always very high. I couldn’t be satisfied with just having an EPUB reader with an AI companion. I wanted the very best AI companion you could have for reading a book.

That meant: if I’m reading fiction, I do not want to be spoilt, but I’d like to ask questions. If I’m reading nonfiction, I’d like to “look ahead”, and see if this book is nothing more than a glorified blogpost.

I don’t want to take my book and then go to NotebookLM and ask questions there. I want to tell my app what line I’m reading, and then ask a question about that specific line.

I want to ask previous books in an epic fantasy series “when the hell did this happen?”, because life is complicated these days and our minds wander. Would you believe I didn’t know Mat was carrying the Horn of Valere when I first read the Great Hunt as a kid?

But I also wanted good themes, sync across devices (I own plenty), and I wanted the app to look good on monochromatic e-ink devices like the Boox Palma. One of my favourite apps wouldn’t work in Dark mode on those devices after an update. And I’d paid for the premium version as well!

This laundry list evolved and it became one of those ideas that don’t really sit down quietly to be honest. They have a habit of doing things, almost in a Seussian way. They give you Grand Purpose, perhaps. At least they did to me.

Whenever @loststoic asked if I “had any ideas”, I’d always come back to “The Idea.”

I never really thought that the idea would come to fruition to be honest with you.

A plethora of themes? Check.

Ask questions of my book without fear of spoilers? Check.

Ask questions of an entire book series? Check.

Ask questions of nonfiction books that have nothing to do with each other, but I still want to make queries anyway? Why the hell not?

Live sync across devices? I was hoping for sync without me having to press sync, but this is what Dr. Frankenstein felt, I suppose.

Share quotes with your friends and family without needing another service to collect them? Check.

And, of course, support for the Boox Palma and any other low-ppi, low-refresh-rate, e-ink/e-paper devices? Check.

Did I mention that I can predict just how many minutes a day a user is likely to read using statistics? You’ll have to see it to believe it.

I’ve read 2 books on this app so far myself in the last week, and I have started reading War and Peace on it already.

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