From Doomscrolling to Book Scrolling

As a kid, I was a voracious reader. I was fortunate to have access to a library. I was also fortunate to have a lot of books at home. Many of them were too advanced for my age, such as my brother’s textbooks, my father’s college electrical engineering books, books owned by relatives I had never met. I read everything, not to learn, but to enjoy. Electrical engineering chapters gave me as much joy as Sherlock Holmes. Science and Mathematics were of course my favorites, but many times I did not have stuff to read on those subjects. So, I fell back to whatever I could get my hands on.

As times changed, I lost the leisurely time required to enjoy reading. I went on to do more coding and spending time on the computer. As years passed by, reading became difficult. Job and responsibilities took away the simple joy of spending a leisurely afternoon buried in a book.

Now, I had the financial means to buy as many books as I wanted(though I did not have the storage), but no energy (more than the loss of time) to read them. I kept piling books, both physical and digital, hoping for a day I will sit with them, or restart the habit of reading. That day never came.

Then came doomscrolling, first Twitter and then Reddit. Every time I left the keyboard, the hand automatically reached out for the phone. Scrolling mindlessly, absorbing hate, reading tired memes. That was my smoking break. Just like any bad habit, it did not announce its arrival but refused to leave my abode of peace.

I tried all kinds of blocker apps, deleting the apps itself, but they always came back. The app was not the problem. The problem was the mind. The mind wanted to scroll.

One day, thinking about how AI can help me, the idea came to me. A feed made of books from the library I have built for more than 20 years. I wanted to learn about ML, read commentary on Gita, and recall some nice moments from Harry Potter.

So I did what I know best, I built an app. I uploaded a few of the books I have always wanted to read, and cards with passages, insights and flashcards started showing up depending on what kind of book it is and what I wanted from it. That’s Scroll Reader. It takes your EPUBs and PDFs and turns them into a feed, the same scrolling motion, but drawing from your own library instead of an algorithm’s agenda.

It’s at scrollreader.app if you want to try it with your own books.