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.
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.