My mom and grandma also read books with a physical notebook handy, and seems like modern technology should make that unnecessary.
I was laid off as part of the massive layoffs in 2022 and made a first pass at the project. I didn't use epubjs and instead wasted a lot of time making a custom rendering engine -- this was dumb. Eventually I got another job and paused the project. I started again in earnest a month or so ago using epubjs as the base.
hmm having a sort of mini-forum-like experience tied to particular pages in a book seems like a fascinating idea! being able to discuss plot twists and such only once you've already gotten to that point?
wow this seems like an amazing idea actually! any names yet? I'd love to check it out once it's done!
The way I am connecting external content to the epub is through an anchoring system -- sequences of words can be hashed to form unique ids that are referenced by the enhancement. Doing this lets me index the enhancement content in such a way that is format-independent and doesn't require modifying the underlying epub.
The specific task o1 helped me with was determining what the text is visible at any given point in time. This text is then turned into hashes to pull the relevant enhancement content.
Getting the current words on the page doesn't seem all that complex, but the epub.js API is pretty confusing. There are abstractions like "Rendition", "Location", "Contents", "Range", and it's not always intuitive which of these will provide the appropriate methods. I'm sure I would have figured it out eventually by looking at the API docs, but GPT probably saved me and hour or two of trial-and-error.