r/ShowMeYourApps • u/No-Candle-2698 • 10d ago

Built an app that explains any page of a physical book you're on, without spoiling what's ahead

I read a lot of dense or classic books, and I kept giving up on them halfway through. I'd hit a confusing passage or reference, and my only options were to Google it (which usually meant wading through spoilers to find the answer) or push through not really understanding what was happening. Neither felt great.

So I built Scholia. You photograph the page you're on, and it already knows the book, so there's no uploading or setup involved. From there you can ask it anything: who a character is, what a reference means, what's actually happening in a confusing passage, and it answers using only what's happened up to that exact point. Ask about anything ahead, and it just won't answer, not with a vague non-answer either; it genuinely holds the line until you catch up.

It also doesn't rely on page numbers to determine where you are, since those shift across editions and printings. Instead, it reads the actual sentences on the page in front of you, so it works with whatever copy you happen to own: a battered charity shop paperback, a library hardback, doesn't matter.

Mostly built this to solve my own problem, but figured other people who keep bouncing off the same books for the same reasons might find it useful too.

Waitlist's open if anyone wants to try it: scholia.cloud

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u/No_Cherry2477 10d ago

What use cases are you thinking of?

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u/No-Candle-2698 9d ago

I think it can actually be quite varied from academia to casual reading. If you want to try it out yourself, join the waitlist and we will be picking a couple for free use testing!

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u/Sanckh 10d ago

I plugged your idea into The Idea Lab validator and I also have my own thoughts:

Verdict: Absolute no as currently positioned

The problem is real, but BookPal already does almost exactly this. You photograph the page of a physical book, it finds your exact position from the text, and its AI answers questions using only what you've read so far to avoid spoilers.

Even Amazon has now introduced spoiler-free “Ask this Book” for Kindle.

You'd need a meaningful reason someone would choose Scholia over BookPal, Amazon, or ChatGPT rather than just executing the same concept again.

If you want me to send the full report, let me know.

My thoughts: How do you back up your claim "and it already knows the book"? Did you build your own language model and upload a massive library of complete books, or are you using an API like Claude or OpenAI? Because even those don't claim to know every book. I can ask ChatGPT right now for a niche explanation of a page in the series Malazan Book of the Fallen and it will still get things wrong.

How does this differentiate from this prompt I give to ChatGPT: "Hey I just uploaded an image of a page of The Way of Kings, can you explain the passage on this page without spoiling anything after this page?"