Sebastiano Edoardo Casella

Damn, Apple's Books is so bad! It slows down and ends up crashing all the time. No matter what, with the willing support of Claude Code, I set up an alternative in less than 5 hours.

Well, it's a little upgraded compared to the vast majority of readers. Since I needed it, I implemented semantic search, text highlighting in 4 colors (with notes), and an integrated text-to-speech engine so you can listen to your books on the go. Plus, there's a direct connection to the amazing library of Project Gutenberg.

Now you can leverage semantic search to find the exact right spot with pinpoint precision, listen seamlessly whenever you prefer audio, and download tons of books directly from Gutenberg without leaving the app—keeping everything in one place.

To power the semantic search, the system indexes the content of your books using an integrated vector database, so just give it about 10–25 seconds to process a new title.

Well, I needed all of that—maybe it'll be useful for you too.

1. Get the DMG ARM-64 here (MacOS)
2. Windows version
3. Linux AppImage version
4. Linux Deb