Note by @fastfinge

Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

6d

I recorded a quick audio demo comparing Dolphin Easy Reader and Paperback head-to-head on screen reader accessibility and general app performance. In the attached recording, I walk through Easy Reader’s clunky UI, duplicate speech readouts, tabindex quirks, and much more, followed by showing how Paperback blows it completely out of the water by opening massive EPUB's instantly and just being generally much easier to navigate.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

5d

@TheQuinbox If paperback could do audio (especially daisy/zip) my life would be perfect, honestly. There's no good, cross-platform audiobook reader. There are a couple that are okay on IOS. But even on IOS, since the enshitification of VoiceDream Reader, we have no good, single "read everything" app; it's one for ebooks, and one for audiobooks.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

5d

@fastfinge Well, this is in the pipeline. Not sure when it'll be done, but a contributor and someone I'm becoming friends with has began adding this, and I am here for it.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

5d

@TheQuinbox As someone who subscribed to VoiceDream until it just got too buggy to even use at all, if paperback does audio and text I'll happily toss over a few bucks or buy it from the app store or something. I don't even need or want cross-platform syncing of my place or anything. Just one app to do all my reading in all my places. It sounds silly, but now that I'm split between two apps, I find myself forgetting about either audiobooks or ebooks. Like I read both normally, but now I just start the next book in whatever app I happen to be in when the last one finished, rather than thinking about what's on my to be read pile in both formats.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

5d

@fastfinge The plan is that we'll initially have a free test period for Paperback on mobile. This will also be when 0.9.0 of the desktop software will get released, both for Windows and macOS. Then, once we get feedback from lots of users, 1.0 will go into the app store/play store officially, with a price tag around $20.00, the same price Voice Dream was before it went subscription. I am also considering having a macOS app store version that's an optional paid upgrade, make it very clear it's a supporter's edition because you'll always be able to download Paperback for free, even if the auto updater doesn't yet work on Mac, but you'll pay to support me and get automagic updates. And eventually, no idea when, I do want to add syncing. It'll be complicated and require me to think about a lot, and to be completely honest if you want to use my servers for it it'll likely be something like a one dollar a month subscription fee, but I see no reason I couldn't just...let people host their own servers if they're not happy with that, it is open source.

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Elijah Massey @emassey0135@caneandable.social

5h

@TheQuinbox @fastfinge For syncing, I was considering setting up Syncthing for the Paperback state folder/file and syncing it between multiple devices that way. On mobile I think that is hidden now, but that could be changed. However, I think you're right with creating a custom syncing solution because using Syncthing would cause sync conflicts if two copies of Paperback are running at the same time. However, you could still take some ideas from Syncthing's design; I don't think you would need to have a server. Syncthing connects computers directly to each other either over LAN, or using UDP hole punching or other tricks to get past NAT, or using relay servers if nothing else works. On desktop Paperback could sync continuously while its open, and on Android that would work too. On iOS you can't have continuous background syncing, but you could have it sync periodically in the background like Synctrain does, and when the app is open in the foreground. You might even be able to use the Syncthing library, and Paperback would handle the conflict resolution while Syncthing would handle the network protocol and connection and things like that. This would require two instances of Paperback to be open or in the background at the same time to sync, but there could be a small server application that just syncs with Paperback instances and runs all the time that people could self-host on a Raspberry Pi or VPS, and you could offer a cheap hosting plan and run a server that people can add their instances to, although for that the server program would have to support multiple users. But the benefit is that people don't have to have a server and don't have to pay for hosting if they don't want to. And you would only need to sync bookmarks and reading positions, since you can already sync books with Syncthing in your own folders, although syncing books might be a good extra later on since its a natural extension.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1h

@emassey0135 @TheQuinbox Whereas just using audiobookshelf would skip literally all of that complexity. Run it yourself or pay someone to run it for you. Expecting all that work just to avoid running a server seems unreasonable and entitled, to me.

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