Announcing Qurika - a Beautiful 3D eBook Reader for Android and iOS!

[jacob_qurika]

Hello MobileReaders!

My name is Jacob, and I'm really excited to announce Qurika, an eBook reader that I built for Android and iOS. I have been working on this for a long time and, after overcoming many technical challenges, it is finally here and I'm thrilled to share it with you. I think Qurika is a big step forward in eBook UI design and I hope you give it a try.


WHAT QURIKA DOES DIFFERENTLY

What Qurika does differently is this - it lets you feel like you are reading a physical book by displaying your eBooks as a beautiful 3D simulation of a physical book and gives you a powerful UI for controlling and navigating through the book. You can:

1. Flip through your book! You can scroll through your book and watch the pages fly by. It’s just like thumbing through a book.
2. Instantly gauge how big a book is from its thickness. In the Qurika 3D display, each book is shown as a real-time visualization of the actual number of pages in the book, so you always have a sense of the size of the book you are reading.
3. Always know where you are in the book. A percentage or a number can tell you where you are in the book, but it doesn’t evoke the same feeling as actually seeing the pages you have read and how many you have to go. In the Qurika 3D display, this is just part of visualization of the book.
4. Turn pages in quick succession. Tap a few times to go forward (or back) and watch the pages turn simultaneously. It's these little things that make you feel in control of the book and makes navigation faster and more intuitive.
5. Pinch in gesture shuts the book to give you a global view of the book. There is a tab that shows where you are in the book, so you don't lose your place.
6. View chapters as tabs into the book. This lets you know exactly where the chapters are inside the book.

SCREENSHOTS




GETTING BOOKS TO QURIKA (Calibre Plugin Support)

I've also made it very easy to get your eBook files into Qurika with the Qurika Uploader for Windows and Mac. The Uploader can watch one or more directories and upload all the books that it finds there (and in subdirectories) to the Qurika Cloud Library which then synchronizes to all your devices.

It gets better. The Qurika Uploader is fully compatible with Calibre filetype plugins! Install a Calibre filetype plugin into Qurika Uploader and it will use an internal copy of Calibre and apply the plugin to the book before it uploads it to Qurika.

The Uploader is still in beta, but it is quite stable and usable.

You can also simply visit https://qurika.com/library on your browser and drag and drop your eBook files into the webpage.


TRY QURIKA

It would mean a lot to me if you gave Qurika a try. I think it can be a big improvement to your eBook reading experience. You can get it on the Apple App Store (link) and Google Play Store (link). The Uploader is available at https://qurika.com.

I would love to hear your feedback. I hope to have a deep engagement with the MobileRead community, so I will be around to hear your thoughts! There are some obvious missing features that I am already working on such as highlighting, notes, and in-book search. Let me know what you would like to see added to Qurika. It will help me prioritize the development work.


PRICING
Qurika is now free! Store up to 2000 books in the online cloud library. If you need storage for more than 2000 books, contact us and we will happily increase your limit (for free!).

Old pricing:

Spoiler:

Qurika is free forever to try (no credit card needed). We do however charge for storage on the cloud for more than 10 books. Currently the pricing is as follows:

$0/month for up to 10 books
$1/month for up to 250 books
$2/month for up to 1000 books
$5/month for up to 5000 books

The plans are billed annually.
If you sign up for a paid plan, as a thank you for being an early user, use MOBILEREAD_50 coupon for 50% off forever on any plan. (Max 50 redemptions)

CONTACT
I would love to hear from you. I'll be on this forum obviously, but you can also get in touch with me at hi@qurika.com if you prefer to communicate directly.

Happy reading!

-Jacob

[Deskisamess]

No landscape mode, which makes it useless to me for my iPads.

I don't want to give up my email address to try it. It's free but fees are mentioned?

[jacob_qurika]

Hi Dekisamess!

Thanks for the feedback. Landscape mode is a definitely on the wish list. This is an initial release, so expect to see features added over the next few months.

Qurika is designed around a cloud library for storage and synchronization, so registering with an email address is a requirement unfortunately. I could consider adding a trial mode without registration if there is a big demand for it.

Qurika is a free forever to try (no credit card needed). We do however charge for storage on cloud if you have more than 10 books. (It's $1 a month for 250 books, $2 for 1000, and $5 for 5000 books).

Best,

-Jacob

[jacob_qurika]

Updated the post with the pricing plans to make that clear.

[Deskisamess]

I see nothing to entice me. I did install it on my iPhone 7+. Two font choices, Times New Roman or Verdana. You have to close the book to adjust the font. 40% of the screen is margins, and the dark grey around the edges of the book.

There is no setting for background color choices, making the font large enough to see only gives me about 100 words per page, as most of the screen is used up by the UI. I measured it, there is a 1" margin space around the text on all 4 sides.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I need font, line spacing, and background color options. Seeing a 3D representation of a book means nothing to me. Having to pay for storage makes this a certain no go to me.

[jacob_qurika]

Thanks for the feedback Deskisamess. I'll take your comments into consideration. I hope I'll be able to get you on as a user perhaps later after a few more features have been built in.

[Deskisamess]

I'm curious what other ebook apps you've used yourself. Moon Reader, KyBook, Gerty, and the apps for Kindle books, nook, Kobo, iBooks, etc.

I'm not a "power user" of this apps. And I know that there are other apps that the users here prefer. They tend to be feature rich, not cutesipie.

[jacob_qurika]

First off, thanks again for trying Qurika. As far as feature richness is concerned, Qurika will definitely be on par with other eBook readers. It is just a question of time. I believe all the other eBook readers were developed this way as well. None of them started out with all the features they have now. They were built in over many iterations.

But let me expand a bit more on the the core features for which I built Qurika and why it may still be worthwhile to use it while I build in the missing features.

eBook readers are a giant leap forward in the technology of reading. But there are some key features of physical books that I sorely missed when using existing eBook readers. I built Qurika to fix these problems. Here they are:

1. BOOK SIZE
When you look at a physical book, you immediately get a sense of how big the book is. War and Peace is clearly a thick tome that will take you weeks or months to finish whereas The Old Man and the Sea will take you only an hour or two. eBooks, however, are visually flat 2D representations. Both War and Peace and The Old Man and the Sea present themselves the same way--a flat picture of the cover. Yes, you can look at the word count or the page count and find out that one is twenty times bigger than the other. But the visual representation of the book, which we perceive that much faster and more directly than any text, just doesn't tell you.

2. WHERE IN THE BOOK ARE YOU?
This is related to the previous issue. When you are in the middle of reading a physical book, you always know where you are in the book--beginning, middle, or end--based on the thickness of the part you've read vs the part you haven't. eBooks don't tell you this because, again, they are flat. The first page looks the same as the last page. Yes, you can get that information from page numbers--seeing that you are on page 68 of 287 tells you where you are. But again, the visual representation of the book itself does not clue you in.

3. FLIP THROUGH THE PAGES
When I pick up a physical book off the shelf, I never start reading at page 1. I first flip through it. Forwards and backwards. Are there pictures? Are there equations? Is it a dense font? Is it easy to read? Is it funny? eBook readers don't let you scan with anywhere close to the same ease and speed. They were built to march through page by page, or search for a specific word, or get to a specific chapter. The pleasures of flipping through the pages of a physical book is gone.

To me these were big problems that limited my enjoyment and use of eBooks. I built Qurika to fix these issues. To do that, I created a 3D representation of a book instead of the usual 2D. You can see the edge of the book in Qurika. It tells you how thick the book is. So now you'll know whether you're picking up War and Peace or The Old Man and the Sea. You can flip through the pages quickly (and beautifully!) to see if it's 18th century prose, 21st century haiku, or a bunch of math equations. Once you are inside the book, you will immediately know, just like with a physical book, whether you're in the first half of the book or nearing the end.

Yes, to do this requires using up some of the screen to depict the thickness of the book. I will be optimizing the margin significantly to make this much less of an issue, but it will never completely go away. It's a core feature of Qurika. Using up the whole screen like the standard eBook readers do will always be more efficient--you can fit more words on the page. But to me, losing some screen real estate is totally worth the gains from a 3D representation of the book.

I’ll reiterate that Qurika is not full featured yet. I will add search, bookmarks, highlighting, notes, landscape mode, and so on over time. But the core feature that's being offered by Qurika today is a tremendously different experience of eBook reading--much closer to reading a physical book than what any other eBook reader offers. The most common complaint of eBooks is that they are not as pleasant to read as a physical book and Qurika can bridge the gap. It might not be for everyone, and I respect that choice. But I strongly believe that a unique reader like Qurika adds a lot of value to the eBook community.

Best,

-Jacob

[ilovejedd]

Privacy and encryption?

[Deskisamess]

But the core feature that's being offered by Qurika today is a tremendously different experience of eBook reading--much closer to reading a physical book than what any other eBook reader offers.

I made the switch to digital books for exactly those reasons. Reading a physical book is difficult, if not outright impossible for me. As to your claim that the most common complaint about digital books not being as pleasant to read as a paper book...on what do you base your claim? My experience is that people who may say that have never used an ebook reader app or dedicated device.

The words on the screen are the book. Control over those words is what makes digital books so appealing for many. Those are the options on which an app needs to focus. An app with no options for bookmarks, highlights, font choice, line spacing, margins, or background color options, is an app most users will not even try, beyond a cursory glance.

[jacob_qurika]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Privacy and encryption?

Qurika's Privacy Policy was designed right at the start of development. You can find it at https://qurika.com/privacy in very readable text. It was modeled on the policies of all the major cloud based eBook libraries and apps (Kindle, Nook, etc), so there are no surprises there.

We are currently not GDPR compliant (and therefore not available in GDPR countries).

As for encryption, all user data on Qurika is encrypted on transport (https) and storage (AES) and is managed by Google Cloud Platform, so it is state of the art.

[DuckieTigger]

The app is quite useless without a computer. There is no way to upload any books even with a browser (drag and drop only, no upload button or select file). And then if you change the font size it downloads the whole book from the cloud again? There is no excuse that changing the font or size requires an internet connection.

[jacob_qurika]

Thank you for trying it out! I’ll add an upload button to select file(s) for direct upload. On the topic of getting books into Qurika, what would be your ideal method? Feedback on this topic would be especially valuable.

The font changes needs the server because the 3D UI for Qurika requires very fast bitmapping of the pages to send to the GPU and some preprocessing is needed on the server side to make it fast enough. I will add a real-time preview of the font size changes so you can be sure it is what you want before having to download it. I’ll also allow the ability to change the default font size so you won’t have to change it for every book.

Thanks again for trying it out. This is very valuable feedback!

[DuckieTigger]

I suppose with browser would work if it had a upload button so it works on mobile as well. Possibly inside the app itself. A consideration might be to let the pre processing be done on the reading app itself (maybe optional) - being able to work offline would be good.

Very large books have a slight graphic fluke in the browser. LOTR is okay, but much bigger books are cut off. In the app itself the one huge book is all shown, but it kinda lays behind.

First picture is the app, 2nd the web. (LOTR is 1791 pages with standard settings, while my Dresden Files omnibus has 4799 pages)

ETA: 3rd picture shows my omnibus on last chapter, but there is so many pages to the left, that the handle to flip pages on the right disappeared. Only way to use it again is pinch out and grab it shut book.

[DuckieTigger]

Also the chapter view is pretty neat if you could click on a chapter to open it.