Hello Wikimedians,

(I am Subodh Kulkarni working with the Open Knowledge Initiatives team,
IIIT-Hyderabad. I am writing to provide an update that started at CIS and
has now come to fruition). This message has been sent by Bodhisattwa and
Sai Phanindra in their volunteer capacity on a few other relevant mailing
lists.

It gives us immense pleasure and excitement to you that the *Wikisource
Reader mobile application
<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.cis_india.wsreader>* is
now released for Android users at the Google Play Store for them to read
books which are completely proofread and transcluded on Wikisource
websites. The Github repo is here
<https://github.com/cis-india/wikisource-reader> and a website for the app
<https://cis-india.github.io/wikisource-reader-app/> is also created. The
development of the app was financially supported by Centre for Internet and
Society until March 2025, who also host the app on Google play store now.
The support to this app was of strategic priority (to develop and build
technological solutions for global majority projects on Wikimedia
platforms) for CIS and will continue to be taken up at OKI as well.

The metadata of the books are fetched directly from Wikidata and strictly
follows the bibliographical book model
<http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Books> of Wikidata. So to appear in
the app, any completed book must fulfill the three mandatory criteria
mentioned below. They need to have corresponding:

   - Wikidata items
   - Wikisource sitelink with proofread or validation badges
   - P1957 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1957> property linked
   in the items.

A sample Wikidata item of one such book is here
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q51614301>. A sample SPARQL query to list
the books to be displayed in the app for one specific language is here
<https://w.wiki/F4Av>. A detailed documentation can be found on this Meta-Wiki
page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource_reader_app/Selection>.

The app currently hosts more than 7300 books in 22 language Wikisource
editions like Assamese, Bangla, Catalan, Czech, Danish, English, French,
Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Javanese, Marathi, Malay, Polish, Punjabi,
Spanish, Sundanese, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. More
languages will be added in next releases as and when they fulfill the
mandatory criteria in due course for at least 1-5 books as a start.

The app has the following features

   1. Clean and beautiful user interface
   2. Dark and Light theme
   3. Option to browse free e-books in multiple languages
   4. Option to import books from non-Wikisource external sources
   5. Option to filter books in different literary forms
   6. Option to download books for offline access
   7. Option to store, read and delete books from library
   8. Option to jump through chapters
   9. In-built e-book reader
   10. Customization of font color, size and weight
   11. Light, Dark, Sepia and customized color mode for reading
   12. Adjustment of page margins
   13. RTL and LTR support
   14. System default typeface along with options for Literata, Sans Sarif,
   IA Writer Duospace, AccsiibleDfa and OpenDyslexic typefaces
   15. Option to choose among left, right and justified text alignments
   16. Customization of line height, paragraph indent, paragraph spacing,
   word spacing and letter spacing
   17. Options to highlight, underline and annotate texts
   18. Option to bookmark
   19. Text to Speech in different languages with customizable speed and
   pitch

The app is dependent on

   - WSindex API <https://wsindex.toolforge.org/books/>, which was built
   specifically to fetch books for the app. The source code is here
   <https://codeberg.org/ph4ni/wsindex>.
   - WS export <https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:WS_Export> tool to
   generate Epubs
   - Myne app <https://github.com/Pool-Of-Tears/Myne/> by Shivam
   <https://krsh.dev/> for user interface
   - Readium mobile <https://github.com/readium/kotlin-toolkit> by The
   European Digital Reading Lab (EDRLab)
   <https://www.edrlab.org/software/readium-mobile/> for the actual reading
   experience.

The app is now developed and maintained in volunteer capacity and we
welcome all open source developers and experienced Wikisourcerers to
contribute to the development of the app for the future.

We sincerely thank everyone who was involved in supporting the app in
different ways, without whom this app could not have been developed.

Regards,

Subodh Kulkarni
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