Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A new way to read books, magnifying in and out
After watching The Odyssey, I thought it would be cool to check out some scenes from the source in detail, but I don't have time to read the whole book. So I came up with a sort of zoom/microscope, that allows to see the whole book at a glance and then zoom in (by pinching) on the part I'm interested in. I can do so down to the actual source text and get the authentic feel the author intended, at the same time I better understand where am I in the text and also the character and places are clickable so I can quickly orient myself on the context. Moreover each character has relationships…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · its alternatives →
- 2
Hi HN! I've been working on BookWith, an open-source e-book reader that integrates AI as your reading companion. The problem: Traditional e-readers are passive. When you encounter something unclear, you have to context-switch to search for it. Your highlights and notes remain isolated, and you can't easily connect ideas across different books. My solution: BookWith embeds an AI that maintains full context of what you're reading. It features: - Context-aware AI chat: Ask questions about the current page/chapter and get instant answers - AI podcast generation: Automatically converts book…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Meditation on reading by a master book cover designer
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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Readmill▲69A beautiful e-book reader for iPhone, iPad and Android
2013 · readmill.com · its alternatives →
- 7AC
I built ProRead to prevent stalling on long passages and to keep the overall context clear. Features * Bird’s-eye overview with drill-down to any level * Interactive maps showing concept links * Quick switch between chapter summaries and original text * Contextual AI Q\&A * Text-to-speech for any book or summary level * EPUB upload for instant access Includes nine classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) and support for your own books. I arrived at this by piecing together LLM-based workflows for reading until I decided to build a dedicated tool. Feedback welcome.
2025 · proread.ai · its alternatives →
- 8
Extensions for CGFloat and UIView to improve readability
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9AI
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…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Folio▲98A read-later app sending a typeset digest to your e-reader
Aug 2026 · myfolio.so · its alternatives →
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A remarkable range of examples of visual thinkinking
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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The bible for people interested in presenting information
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Read your books in VR Environments
2018 · vrbookreader.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Hey HN! I’m Miran Antamian, founder and CEO of BookWatch, and I’m thrilled to introduce BookWatch.com. The first AI-powered Visual Library for learners who hate reading but love growing. After 1.5 years of building, 65,000+ mobile app users, and countless animated summaries, we’re launching our New Web App to make learning even more effortless. The Problem: Visual Learners Can’t Learn from Books in Text or Audio Formats Did you know that 65% of people identify as visual learners? Yet most book knowledge remains trapped in text format. Many of us want the wisdom of great books but struggle…
2025 · bookwatch.com · its alternatives →
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Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Jun 2026 · tryquincy.live · its alternatives →
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The simple way to read and guarantee remarkable results
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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I asked Codex 5.6 Sol Medium to one-shot a tree-view version of The Odyssey because I wanted to familiarize myself with it before I see the film. Think of it as an interactive Cliffs Notes where you can stay high level or drill down to the source text. I used Gemma-4-26B-A4B locally to do the summarization. Codex wrote the scripts, HTML tree viewer, and babysat the summarization pipeline. Each of the Odyssey's 24 books is distilled into a paragraph. When you click a paragraph, each paragraph of the source has been distilled to one sentence. Tapping any one sentence shows you the source…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Mimir▲7What would reading look like if it were designed around how people actually learn? I got tired of all the AI study tools that actually just take the cognitive work of studying or reading away from you, instead of building up your own brain. Reading today is also just not the best experience as you forget so much of what you read. I built Mimir, (readmimir.com), an interactive immersive reader that let's you upload any book/text, read in immersive reading with TTS, active recall, in-margin notes, ask-ai tutor, and automatically creates spaced repetition notes from your notes and answers.…
Jan 2026 · readmimir.com · its alternatives →
- 21
I am not sure if this is useful for anyone else but I recently found myself converting a lot of books / magazines and content to NotebookLM Deep Dives, so, I wrote this quick plugin to do that in single click. I find this is a nice way to go through a lot of content (during commute etc.) and pick interesting stuff to read. Think of it as skimming a book and deciding to read it.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22IB
I use AI while reading the Bible and I suspect others do too. It's helpful whether you're struggling with the Elizabethan English, or want added context/want to know what theologians say about a passage. So I thought, why not make the AI come to you? TIA for any feedback!
2025 · scripturia.com · its alternatives →
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A see-through bookmark A clip on book light
2018 · geecr.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →