Hi HN!
I originally built this app for myself because, as an intermediate Chinese learner, I wanted a clean EPUB reader with fast, offline pop-up dictionary support.
As a small thank-you to the Chinese learning community, I decided to make it a free and open-source iOS app.
Main features: - Import your own EPUBs
- Long-press any Chinese text to get an inline dictionary definition
- Option to copy the word, sentence, or paragraph, or send text to Pleco / ChatGPT (if installed)
- Everything works fully offline and the app collects no data
I’m mainly trying to figure out whether this kind of pop-up dictionary EPUB reading workflow is actually useful for people who read Chinese regularly, so any honest feedback (good or bad) would be super helpful!
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wen-reader/id6755988730
GitHub: https://github.com/oliverzh2000/wen-reader
Happy to answer questions or dive into implementation details.
Nice job. As both a student of Chinese and someone who has also developed their own language apps, I think the value prop is the hardest issue you’re going to face. Most apps that I've used on my iPad (Documents, Kindle Reader, and even Pleco itself) already support ePub out of the box.
Additionally they also all support long-press on words to bring up popups containing the Chinese/English definitions.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment - really appreciate it as a fellow Chinese learner!
You’re right that Pleco and apps like Apple Books, Google Play Books, and Kindle already cover a lot. I use Pleco’s document reader all the time and it’s amazing, but it can struggle with formatting (like images), and is a paid add-on. On the other hand, Apple Books handles typography beautifully, but dictionary lookup requires a long press and multiple taps - not a big deal for native readers, but it slows down reading if you’re looking up lots of words.
My app tries to sit in between: properly formatted EPUB rendering, low-friction inline lookup, and solid segmentation and dictionary definition quality - with the goal of eventually adding context-aware segmentation and sense disambiguation if there’s interest.
I’m genuinely not sure how many people want that, which is why feedback from other Chinese learners is especially helpful.
Appreciate you taking the time to write this.