I’ve been building Merrilin for the last 45 days. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing so, and I’ve written about how it came from wanting to read War and Peace with an AI companion. That wasn’t the entire story, however. I also wanted a better ebook app.

I think in this one thing, I’ve learnt a lot about how I read. Before Merrilin was functional, I used KOReader for epubs and ReadEra for PDFs. I like those two pieces of software, they’re really good. And that was the problem, I liked both of them.

I don’t love them completely.

With KOReader, I love its analytics and refinements in the UI, dual progress bars make so much more sense to me. With ReadEra, I love its support for PDFs. They look so good on it.

But, I also didn’t like their other parts. Both are terrible at syncing. I have to deliberate syncing reading progress if I want to be 100% accurate. I switch devices a lot, and I want to be able to read across them without hunting for my progress.

I also want to sync highlights. KOReader needs a plugin for everything. Not to disparage the contributors, it’s a great design, but it’s also taking me away from reading.

Anything that takes me away from reading is a bad thing for me. I want to read. I’ve largely moved away from physical books, I prefer having my library in my pocket on the go.

Lately I’ve been trying to smoothen the experience on Merrilin, predominantly the apps. We don’t yet publish them to the Play or App stores yet, but we plan to, soon.

I’m user #1, the moment we had an installable APK, I stopped using KOReader and ReadEra. No matter how terrible the experience on the app, I wanted to use it. I had to, if I was going to make this work.

But it is hard right now. So much is broken. I have a PR that’s already crossed the ludicrous tag and it’s only getting worse. I have fixed a lot of bugs, but there’s so much more. I’m having fun doing this, and it’s interesting to see how much we take for granted in our favourite apps. There’s a part of me that wants to fix everything, but also a part of me that wants to read.

Would you believe me if I told you that swiping to turn a page is so annoying to implement? Personally, I use the volume keys to turn pages, or I use taps. But many people prefer to swipe.

I miss reading on an app that I don’t have to maintain, becuase I don’t notice the bugs, if they’re there. I accept them.

I don’t accept them when it’s my own work. But playing catchup to good software that was written over years is not easy.

Merrilin will get better, because I will continue to use it and as long as I do, I will never be satisfied.