Parallel reading, markdown annotations, and more Valla updates
Valla Reader is my attempt to build an ebook reader app that offers a solid core experience (fast, clean UI, good typography) alongside advanced features for exploring and annotating books. Many ebook apps offer one or the other, but none offer both.
To this point, some exciting product updates!
A scratch space for parallel reading
When you read a physical book, you might read with a notebook open, have a finger in the back of the book, or dog ear pages to mark spots. Typically, reading on a screen is way more constrained, surprising given the infinite flexibility of the digital canvas.
I added a sidebar called the Scratch Space that gives you a place to read in parallel, queue up passages to annotate, or keep things open as reference. It's a step toward the goal of enabling more non-linear reading experiences.
Your annotations in markdown files
Inspired by "File Over App", for every book you open in Valla, a markdown file is created to store your interactions including your current position, highlights, and notes — no manual exports necessary! If you use Obsidian for note-taking, you can set the Valla output directory to be a subdirectory of your vault and edits you make in Obsidian get synced back into Valla.
Keyboard shortcuts and ⌘+K support
A goal of Valla is to make every part of the app accessible via the keyboard. A new spotlight feature (openable by ⌘+K) lets you search through a book, navigate chapters, and jump around all in a single modal. Press ⌘+/ to see all other keyboard shortcuts.
I have lots of ideas for how to make the core book reading and annotation experience drivable by keyboard. To be continued...
Other updates
Dark mode
Don't burn your retinas when reading in the dark.
Image tab
Valla finds all the images in a book and displays them in a tab.
Next up
My next major focus will be improving the speed and rendering of epub files.
Supporting Valla
Valla is free to use while I work on these early beta versions.
If you want to help me do less paid dev work and more work on Valla, please consider becoming a supporter! In particular, the more support I can get, the sooner I'll start work on a mobile version!
Please email me if you encounter bugs or have feature requests.
Thanks for reading,
Andrew