BookTalk.org

Hi, Hope everyone is well. I've recently started using book recommendation apps such as Goodreads. i'm doing research to make my own and was wondering, what are some struggles you've had with such apps? What did you like about them? I appreciate any responses. Thanks in advance.

Hi Troy,

I use eBookDroid on my Android devices. It's a great free, ad-free, PDF and DJVU reader. It can open ePubs as well, but the app takes awhile before displaying the ebook. There are no book recommendations ability via this app. But it displays bookshelves (!) based on folders the ebooks are in, which is perfect for scrolling through, seeing each book's coverpage. It also handles very large libraries.

Lithium: EPUB Reader is a good ePub reader. But I convert ePubs to PDF via Calibre and haven't used Lithium much to comment.

I have a couple dozen websites bookmarked that offer free (legal) books. I imagine you could (with the webmaster's permission?) use a spider/webscraper along with whatever APIs needed to provide users with downloadable books. Or you could download them and host them somewhere.

What is your target platform (Windows, iOS, Android) and what programming language do you plan to use to build the book reading app? Or did I mistake your "i'm doing research to make my own"?

Hi, i use ReadApp on my phone i find it very practical and easy to use. On my computer I always used HamsterPdf.