Show HN: An immersive, social reading app for book nerds

by ishanr on 4/10/2025, 2:29:12 AM with 2 comments
This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)".

I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book.

I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions.

It's still early but here are a couple of features:

1. A really solid cross platform epub reader

2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon)

3. Book chat where you can chat with the book and ask questions such as how to apply lessons to real life.

4. Chat with other readers, aka, a virtual book club which you automatically join if you have a book (also doesn't have to be an exact match. philoshopher's stone + sorcerer's stone for example would join the same club.

5. Background music that understands what you are reading and adapts accordingly (still clunky - I will do another pass soon).

I have been working on this for about a month now (started 3 months back but working on it only on weekends). It is a Tauri app so the sizes are really small (4MB). InstantDB is doing a lot of the syncing, auth, chat, stuff. (You don't need to login but it is recommended to get all the social features).

The goal is to have a place to publish books as well as read them as fewer people are reading and fewer new authors are getting published and to build a community of readers and authors and have a bunch of other interesting things which will make reading more fun and reward those activities.

Oh also there is an auto audiobook functionality coming soon and an iPad app coming soon where you can read some of the book, continue listening to the book in your car and then continue reading on the computer etc. I plan to replace the AI stuff with local models as soon as it is feasible.

Please let me know what other features would you want.

Here are the mac, linux, windows builds: https://getaugre.com

  • by eltonlin on 4/10/2025, 5:06:54 AM

    Love the idea...having some trouble installing and have some skepticism about usability (because I have iBooks, Kindle etc. and the cross-platform thing kills me) but think it's really promising

  • by stopachka on 4/10/2025, 4:46:07 AM

    Tried it with Captain Blood (from project gutenberg), and it worked great! I've always wanted a kind of "social highlighting and discussion app". A few years ago I went through SICP, and an app like this would have been great. Select sections, talk to an AI, start a comment thread about things you don't understand.

    Great work.