Turning Pages with AI: How I Built a Smarter Book App

My Journey Building an AI-Powered Book App

Reading has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, yet the act itself has never been easy. Living with dyslexia often feels like trying to scale a sheer wall: the summit promises a breathtaking view, but every step takes effort. Paradoxically that difficulty only deepened my love for books, especially non-fiction. I gathered shelves of biographies, strategy guides, and design classics, convinced each underline and margin note would serve me later. Reality proved otherwise. Weeks after finishing a title I could picture the page layout but not the sentence that once lit my imagination.

I tested everything I could find. Handwritten summaries. Flash-card apps. Zettelkasten workflows. Each tool chipped away at the problem but none solved it. The moment I left my desk their benefits evaporated, and reading on the move was still a blind climb.

The arrival of ChatGPT and early retrieval-augmented systems changed my outlook. While consulting for a knowledge-base company I saw these models answer questions with breath-taking speed and equally breath-taking errors. They hallucinated, they dated badly, yet they hinted at something powerful. If the open web was too chaotic, perhaps a single curated source—my own library—could offer the stability the models lacked.

Connecting the Dots

One evening the idea clicked into place. What if I could talk to my books the way I talk to a colleague. I wrote a rough script that unpacked an EPUB, turned every paragraph into vectors, and routed questions through a language model. The interface reminded me of dial-up bulletin boards, but the first conversation felt like stepping through the page. I asked a biography to remind me of a key turning point and it guided me to the line I had forgotten. The code was fragile yet the experience was undeniable.

Encouraged by that spark, I posted a short demo online. Students, researchers, and casual readers all reached out. They wanted to use the tool for theses, book clubs, personal study. I lacked time to pursue it then, but the steady trickle of requests planted a seed I could not ignore.

Designing with Purpose

When I returned to the project I knew design would decide its fate. My guiding principle has always been function first. If an interface draws attention to itself it is already in the way. The logo became my compass: an open book whose pages form a rising sun, a quiet promise that knowledge should unfold like dawn across a landscape. Every layout, colour, and interaction needed to serve clarity and fade into the background once reading began.

Learning on the Go

I am not a professional developer, so each feature demanded a crash course. Cursor, an AI-enabled version of VS Code, became my patient mentor. It explained APIs, surfaced errors, and nudged me toward cleaner solutions. The nights were long, but every solved bug taught me something new about the medium I was shaping. I learned how to stream model responses without freezing the UI, how to keep EPUB typography consistent across devices, and how to deploy without waking up to a server bill that resembled a small mortgage.

Time to Build

A holiday break finally offered the space to focus. The goal was clear: create a reading experience that felt inevitable, not ornamental. Responsiveness mattered from the first commit. Whether on a phone, tablet, or desktop, the page had to feel native to the screen beneath it.

I added an embedded reader so a question could jump directly to the cited page. Scrolling needed to be smooth, and note-taking had to feel as natural as dragging a highlighter across paper. Each small refinement removed another ounce of friction.

The Future Is Bright

The roadmap stretches far. I want to seed the reader with open-licensed classics, layer in a screen reader, and offer ways to turn highlights into spaced-repetition prompts without effort. The core is optimised for non-fiction because that is where retention hurts most, yet the underlying engine can work for any genre that values context and recall.

This project began as a solution to my own frustration, but every conversation with another reader reminds me the problem is universal. If you have ever closed a book and wished the best ideas would stay vivid months later, this app was built with you in mind.

I am opening the next wave of private invites soon. If you are curious and willing to share honest impressions, visit bookrise.io and add your name to the wait-list. Your feedback will steer what comes next, from interface tweaks to entirely new features.

Thank you for reading and for helping turn a personal itch into something that might serve many others. The climb is easier when we scale the wall together.

I’d love to hear what you think. Together, we can make reading smarter, deeper, and more personal than ever before. Read. Reflect. Rise.

If you’re curious to try it, and want to help shape what comes next Join the waitlist at BookRise.io