I built an opinionated minimalist ePub/pdf online reader
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Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-DI prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission.If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and seeing this project as well. I have added it first using cors.sh: https://guten.mirror.forumI have also added a cf worker native solution which focuses on the search aspect only as well: https://gutencf.mirror.forumFeel free to ask me or give me any feedback or which one you might like more within this somewhat A/B testing experiment of mine and I just hope that it might be useful to anybody.Cheers and take care![0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709186
HN · launched Jun 28, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 58%) · 0 views
Niche: ebook and reading apps · 190 launches, 18 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Vertical SaaS
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 190 launches in ebook and reading apps →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a client-side reader web application that can be built quickly by pairing open-source libraries like PDF.js and ePub.js with standard browser storage for notes and bookmarks.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 235 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #119 of 236 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 240 days after the earliest competitor.
- A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things · hn · 2026-06-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- PDF One · ph · 2026-10-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Printable Classics · hn · 2026-02-09 · 85 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- I curated 130 US PDF forms and made them fillable in browser · hn · 2026-02-17 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- A free, browser-only PDF tools collection built with Kimi k2.5 · hn · 2026-02-08 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Free EPUB Tools Online · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- EPUBtoPDF · ph · 2026-11-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I wrote a technical history book on Lisp · hn · 2026-02-17 · 252 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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