BookPal
TV-style book recaps from an AI that never reads ahead
1 follower
TV-style book recaps from an AI that never reads ahead
1 follower
You put down a book for two weeks and forget everything. You Google a character name and the ending gets spoiled. BookPal fixes both. It gives you TV-style "Previously On" recaps that only cover what you've read. Your AI never sees a single page ahead of you. Ask it anything about characters or events with zero spoiler risk. Snap a photo of your physical book to sync your page, or read right in the app.
Hey everyone! I'm Tarek, the maker of BookPal.
I'm a heavy reader and I often juggle multiple books at once. I'd constantly forget character names, where a subplot left off, or what happened three chapters ago. Every time I Googled something to jog my memory, autocomplete or a wiki would spoil a major plot point. It happened enough times that I started dreading looking anything up mid-book.
I tried the obvious fix: feeding my book text into an AI chatbot and asking questions there. But I quickly realized the AI has the entire book. It can still ruin things. That's when the core idea clicked. What if the AI could only see as far as you've read? Not one page more.
I also read across formats (physical books, e-readers, my phone) so I built Snap & Sync. Take a photo of the page you're on and BookPal matches it to the exact position in the text. That became the anchor for everything: recaps, chat, and session insights are all bounded by where you actually are in the story.
I've been using it daily for months and genuinely love it. I put my book club on it and they got hooked too. That's when I figured other readers might find it useful.
Full transparency on where things stand: the in-app catalog currently has public domain classics from Standard Ebooks (books whose copyrights have expired). If you want to use BookPal with something you're currently reading, you can upload your own EPUB. I'm actively expanding the catalog, and the content licensing side is still something I'm working through.
Would love any and all feedback. What works, what's missing, what you'd want next. Thanks for checking it out!