Veltri

Overview

Veltri is an EPUB reader as well as a Bring-Your-Own-Key translator for reading Chinese, Japanese, and Korean novels in English. It is a dynamic web app that users can open in their mobile or desktop browser (no download needed). Dropbox integration is also available to sync novels and reading progress across devices.

It is heavily inspired by flowoss.com (for the dynamic web app aspect) and read.teanovel (for the novel translation).

What I built

I had so many ideas for what to put in the app, but I was worried about clutter. It started as a very simple and lightweight web app, which is why I chose Svelte as the framework, but I soon fell into a spiral of thinking up new features that were 'nice to have' but not really needed. So I decided to cut back on features and keep only the ones that most users would use.

I reached out to my friends who read novels, and they found it useful, which made me very happy!

I also asked for their feedback and suggestions, which I used to further improve the app. One suggestion was to add Google Drive for cloud storage. Google Drive turned out to be a bit tedious for users to set up, but it's there anyway.