I'm an animator, learning to be a programmer. I built a free ebook reader with AI. Here's how...

I draw and animate as my main hustle. I had never built an app before this year. But I read a lot of ebooks on my PC, and none of the readers I used felt good enough. What I wanted was simple: read a book the way I read a PDF in Acrobat. Scroll straight through it. Keep a page count that does not jump around when I zoom. Bookmark my place. Copy a passage into my notes. Have tabs for multiple books at a time. The apps I tried did some of this, but not all of it. So I opened a conversation with an AI assistant and described what I wanted. The result is bulleye, a free ebook reader for Windows and Linux. It opens EPUB (Electronic Publication), MOBI (Mobipocket), AZW3 (Amazon Kindle Format 8) files among others (no PDF support yet).

To build, I pointed at Acrobat to the AI tool and said "like this." A concrete reference to start creating from. Change one thing at a time, and test each one. My early versions had real problems: scrolling that stuttered at chapter edges, a two-page view that did nothing, and a book that reopened one page off. Each got fixed by describing exactly what I saw and trying again. The part that reads book files is an existing open library called foliate-js. I did not need to write that from scratch. Initially, the app checked GitHub for new versions and updated itself, but that was fixed to allow updates to be optional. The app will however, always check for a new version if you're connected to the internet when you open it.

What it does today: Continuous scrolling with a steady page count, one-page and two-page views, a library with progress, bookmarks that remember your place, highlights and notes, search inside the book, a dictionary, read aloud with your computer's voices, four themes, colour customisation options, auto scroll for hands-free reading, pomodoro reading mode, tabs for opening multiple ebooks at a time, among other library sorting and customisation functions.

What I'd tell someone starting out: You don't need to know how to code to begin, but you do need to be precise about what you see and what you want. Say what is wrong in plain words. Keep a list of the next small improvements. Ship early, and let real users tell you what to build next. bulleye is free, has no ads and needs no account. You can download it for Windows or Linux here: https://drawerjo.github.io/bulleye If you try it, I'd like to hear what's missing.