Show HN: An Open-Source E-Book Reader for Conversational Reading with an LLM

Sounds like a cool project. Not sure if it's one that I would personally use, but I think that LLMs can be used wisely.

What I've found interesting when doing similar experiments (feeding things like books to an LLM and asking questions) is that the output is almost always more bland than one would hope for. I suspect this may both be a result of LLMs being biased for the material they've been trained on and a reality I've suspected which is that the majority of books are mostly filler and aren't making points that are particularly profound. Most books, when you distill them down, fundamentally communicate ideas that are rather obvious, but the language around those points makes them sound a lot more profound than they really are. It's a kind of hypnosis, I think. In a sense, LLMs may be able to reveal how bereft a piece of written material is.

I disagree with the OP's statement that traditional e-readers being passive is actually a "problem". It's kind of like saying that cars are a problem because they can't fly. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but being alone with a book and one's own thoughts is hardly a problem; if anything, the problem is fewer and fewer people are comfortable without a constant barrage of thoughts other than their own.

When I was trying to extract as much meaning out of George Eliot's Middlemarch as I could, I would read a chapter, and then upload that chapter's text file (thank you Gutenberg) to NotebookLM. I'd then have it extract unusual vocabulary words, Latin phrases, and cultural/historical references and compare that list to my handwritten notes from my close reading session. It was fun to have a dialog with the LLM about the chapter, and I felt like I got a lot out of it.

At some point I'll work on better integrating Emacs's nov.el EPUB reader with gptel to approximate something like this. Books are text, and I already have the ultimate text processing environment that I've invested quite a lot of time in.

If this looks hard to install (you need to host a server, supabase, docker, lots of python dependancies) - instead, you could just install this to Edge https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/epubreader... to use it's built in Copilot sidebar to chat about the book. It would work identical to this project AFAICT, except the back end would be Microsoft.

Nice! I was also thinking about e-reader with LLM support to discuss topics of the book I'm reading with, explain words or phrases (I'm not a native English reader) and so on. But this seems too troublesome to install and does not have a mobile app - I want to read books on the go, not really in front of my computer. Do you think it's possible to make it phone friendly and easier to install?

Just seeing the introduction, I can see this tool hardly adds any value.

The introduction video shows how easy it is to import an epub, and then "asks the ebook" to give them the Table of Contents. While the ToC was already available... no real added value compared to RAG

Interesting project. I've been thinking about a tool like this; I might be following a multi-volume book series, but it's been years since the last book. When I pick up the latest volume, sometimes there are details that I just can't remember (small details that may turn out important, relationships between minor characters, etc.)

I would just consult a fan wiki, but that doesn't work if the title isn't popular or if the book is too new. This seems like the perfect tool if it can somehow maintain coherency across multiple books.

That said, I do understand (and share) a lot of the frustration and hesitancy that people here have around AI tools; I don't want an app that takes away the act of thinking (like that post recently about teachers using AI to make banal lesson plans, and students in turn using AI to write essays -- what is the point then?). I hope you don't take it too much to heart, and try to showcase use cases where your app can actually provide value.

Another piece of feedback is it would be great if this could be all packaged up into a docker image that would make it easy to deploy on a local machine (or like on a home server/NAS). Right now it seems there are still a lot of manual steps and scaffolding.

Is there any mechanism to prevent the AI from answering with spoilers? For example, when I ask about a character I don't want information coming from pages/chapters I still didn't read.

wow. I've been entertaining this idea for some time now (Emphasis on "entertaining"). Seeing that already somebody has actually made this makes me very happy.

Will definitely give it a go.

This feels incredibly dystopian

mega based project, i was thinking about the same. LLMs are very helpful for reading difficult books, or just books requiring previous context. i would add a feature of adding "auto preface" to the book so the reader know what he should know.

"By conversing with an AI that fully understands the book's content in real time,"

That seems like a maybe a wee bit of an overstatement of possibilities.

I recently finished a book I was looking forward to but wound up really disliking [0]. Throughout the book I found myself saying "wtf?" and I occasionally would complain to my spouse about it. After I finished reading, I went to Goodreads and enjoyed the schadenfreud of seeing how many other reviewers had the same reaction and reactions as me. I do wonder if a tool like this could help me experience something like this DURING the reading of the book rather than after, but I also worry about it lessening the book reading experience, contributing to attention drain, or lessening the experience of finishing reading a book and talking with others about it.

0 - Brandon Sanderson's Wind and Truth