Minimal Reader

I'm a huge reader of ebooks, but I've never been happy with the reading experience. Ebooks themselves tend to be poorly typeset and barring a few bright-spots the state of ebook readers is pretty sad: either they're old, abandoned, badly designed or just don't work how I'd like. For example Apple Books, which otherwise is a decent reader, doesn't support vertical scrolling, my preferred way of reading.

↑ Oh, the skeuomorphism (and terrible typography).

Ebook readers put often put a lot of effort into replicating the superficial look of books – paper textures, nice page turn animations, carefully rendered wooden bookshelves etc. – without stopping to think whether that interaction model actually makes sense in a digital context.

For example, the page turn. Pages are great for physical reading (we no longer use long rolls of paper for a reason), but they don't make sense for screen-based content. A gimmick that can be safely ditched. On a digital device, where scrolling is a natural interaction, I'd much rather scroll as I read, rather than having to break focus and swipe the screen the next page. Some readers, like

So I decided to make my own book reader. How hard can it be, I thought, when ebooks are basically just a zip file full of HTML and CSS anyway?

I got something working pretty quickly that unzipped the epub and displayed the contents, but I should have realised earlier that this could lead to problems. Turns out that perhaps just decompressing and reading any old random file with no precautions might lead to a few security issues.

After researching a lot of options, I decided to go with epub.js as it had good sandboxing and isolation, was well developed and had most of the features I needed. I also decided to build it as a web app, using the browser's local storage to cache the book files as it was pretty simple to implement and ensured it would run on any platform.

Interactions

↑ The library.

↑ The reading experience.