Ezra Reader – making reading easier

[Jonathan1]

As Jehovah’s Witnesses, we have a lot of reading to do: Watchtower articles, Bible passages, publications, personal study, and more.

For many of us, that’s no problem. But for some, reading can be a real challenge. Concentration difficulties, ADHD, dyslexia, or simply losing your place in a long text can make it harder to get through the material.

 

That’s why I’m developing Ezra Reader: a dedicated reading app designed to make digital reading more comfortable, focused and accessible. It's  specifically intended for JW articles.

Ezra Reader is not intended to replace any of the Bible study tools or publications provided by the organization. It is simply an additional tool, focused on helping people stay concentrated while reading.

The reading technique behind Ezra Reader is based on the successful SwiftRead app, adapted with our own reading and study needs in mind.

 

The app is open-source and currently under active development. If you’re interested, you can follow the project or contribute on GitHub:

https://github.com/jw-agape-apps/ezra-reader

 

I’d love to hear from jou: What makes digital reading difficult for you, and what would you like to see in a reading app?

Edited yesterday at 11:40 AM by Jonathan1

[Jonathan1]

Ezra Reader does not include or redistribute JW.ORG publications. Users download the EPUB files themselves from the public JW.ORG website and open them locally in Ezra Reader.

 

The app is a free, non-commercial reading tool. It does not host or distribute JW.ORG publications. The JW.ORG Terms of Use specifically allow free, non-commercial applications designed to download EPUB, PDF, MP3 and MP4 files from public areas of the site.

 

Ezra Reader is therefore intended simply as an additional reading environment, not as a replacement for or redistribution of the organization’s Bible study tools and publications.

[Jonathan1]

Open-Source projects

Ezra Reader is actually a project I worked on about two years ago, before Baruch. I recently picked it up again and thought it would be a good opportunity to take it a step further. My main focus, however, remains the development of Baruch.

I’m currently considering making Baruch open source as well, and eventually using GitHub as a place where others can contribute and collaborate.

 

Before doing that, however, I’d like to gain some experience with open-source development and see what works well in practice. I have several other smaller projects that I’m planning to put on GitHub too. So Ezra Reader is partly an experiment: a chance to learn how to organize an open-source project, work with contributors, review changes, discuss ideas, and coordinate development.

 

This is especially important for Baruch. It is a much larger project with an existing structure and architecture that needs to remain consistent. Allowing multiple people to work on it will require considerably more coordination than a small project like Ezra Reader.

So rather than jumping straight into open-sourcing Baruch, I’d like to learn by doing, starting with smaller projects and gradually building up the experience needed to make collaboration on Baruch work well.