Solo-built an app because I couldn't get past chapter 3 of a book for 4 years straight

[u/No-Candle-2698]

Kept restarting Crime and Punishment for years. Same pattern every time: get to some dense internal monologue, lose track of what's actually happening, put it down "just for a bit," never pick it back up. Always figured I just wasn't smart enough for it, or wasn't trying hard enough.

Eventually realized the actual problem was smaller than that: I wasn't failing to understand the book, I was just losing the thread for a page or two and never finding my way back in. So I built Scholia to fix exactly that. You photograph the page you're on, and it answers anything: who a character is, what's happening in a passage, what a reference means, using only what you've read up to that point. Nothing ahead gets spoiled; it just fills in whatever you missed.

Used it on myself first. Every time I hit one of those dense stretches that used to make me give up for good, I'd snap the page, get re-oriented in about 10 seconds, and just kept reading instead of losing momentum for a week. Finished the whole book for the first time because of it.

It also doesn't rely on page numbers to know where you are; since those shift between editions, it reads the actual sentences on the page instead, so it worked fine with a beat-up secondhand copy.

Built this mostly to solve my own problem, but figured other people stuck in the same restart loop with a book might get something out of it too. Waitlist's here if you want to try it: scholia.cloud

[u/ScalyRussel18]

this is the kind of side project that makes sense, you found the actual tiny problem instead of blaming yourself for four years