Show HN: Obooko – Free ebooks with an open-source web reader
by gthartley | 2026-02-06 00:18:35+00:00
Hey HN,
I'm George. I spent few months rebuilding Obooko, a free ebook platform that's been around since 2010 with 11 million downloads. Reading is losing to scrolling, but BookTok has 370B+ views. People want book content, they're just not reading books. I think that’s because modern reading hasn’t kept up with the pace of the internet.

What I built
Obooko is ad-supported like YouTube. No paywall, no subscription, no account required. 4,000+ books across 30+ genres. You can read in the browser, sync across devices, or download as PDF/EPUB/Kindle.
The reader is built on EPUB.js (https://github.com/futurepress/epub.js). Frontend is vanilla JavaScript, no framework. Backend is Laravel handling progress tracking. The implementation uses continuous scrolling, font size controls (4 levels), chapter navigation, and persists reading progress to a pivot table via debounced API calls.
It's still MVP quality. I went with EPUB.js because it was simpler to integrate and I wanted to ship fast. Now that I'm getting user feedback, the reader is the biggest pain point. (Actually, more books is now the #1 request, but reader UX is close behind.) I'm probably going to switch to Readium (https://github.com/readium) which looks more robust but is more work to integrate.

Being a solo founder
This is my third startup but first time doing it alone. I scaled SmartrMail to exit and built Bluethumb to $100M+ in art sales, but both had co-founders. The day-to-day whiplash of switching between growth work and building product is rough. Some days I'm doing SEO audits and writing blog posts, emails, social. Other days I'm debugging PHP. It feels so hard to get everything covered off, and then I spent time building automations for it in Claude but wonder if I’m over automating.

Maybe the hardest thing I’ve discovered as a solo founder is prioritisation and idea selection. I’m used to have someone to shoot down my dumb ideas. Now Claude just tells me every idea is amazing lol and I can get lost in a rabbit hole instead of really working on the most burning priority. And even daily taking stock of 100 to dos from backlog and working out which is #1, #2 is hard. Wondering how other solo founders do this better?

AI audiobooks (and video books):
I've built an MVP with ElevenLabs Voice API and the narration quality is great. But it's expensive. We've got close to 5,000 books and I can't afford to narrate them all that way yet. One idea I have is that once I build native iOS, the on-device voice APIs might be good enough to do narration on the fly. Then users could customise the voice to their preference. Obviously pretty dependent on where Apple get to with their native AI APIs and new devices.

I also know we need a native app soon. The web reader is fine for casual browsing but serious readers want the Kindle experience: offline, fast, no browser chrome. That's a lot for one person to ship.

What's next:
* Adding more excellent out-of-copyright books over the next few weeks (classics, public domain stuff)
* Talking to indie publishers and authors about coming on board
* Building Author Revenue Share (YouTube model for books) which I think will help with author acquisition
* Eventually the native app and AI narration for every book

Why I'm posting:
I'd genuinely love feedback. On the reader, the business model, etc. I’m a long time lurker first (actually 3rd) time poster, and would really love the feedback here.

Try it: https://obooko.com

EPUB.js (what powers the reader): https://github.com/futurepress/epub.js

Happy to answer questions.