Tomen.app VS GitHub Surf

Tomen.app's answer

Tomen is for the library you already own. It reads your EPUBs, comics and manga from the files you have — no store, no account needed to start, nothing locked to a device. The reading is the point: a typographer's page in your choice of face, theme and spacing, the same on the web, Android, Windows and e-ink readers like Boox. Around the reading, a Journal keeps your reading life — days, streaks, where you left off — and an Index lays every book out as a row. Highlights export as plain files you keep. And there's no subscription: Tomen is free, and Plus is one payment, yours on every device for good.

Tomen.app's answer

People who own their books as files. Readers who buy DRM-free, keep a Calibre library, pull classics from Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks, or collect manga and comics as CBZ — and who read across more than one device: a phone on the train, a tablet or Boox at night, a Windows PC at the desk. They've usually just left a store app or an aging reader, they want their highlights to be theirs, and they'd rather pay once than subscribe.

Tomen.app's answer

Because of what you keep. Kindle and Google Play Books will take your own EPUBs, but only by uploading them into their cloud, with their limits, and your highlights live inside their apps. Moon+ Reader reads everything and has for a decade; Tomen is built around the page — real typography, eleven themes, a comic reader that handles spreads — and reads your files where they are, no upload. KOReader is superb on e-ink and a project to set up anywhere else; Tomen runs the same on a phone, tablet, Windows PC, Boox or any browser, with your place and highlights synced between them. Your files stay files; your highlights export as text you own. It's free to use, and the full version is one purchase, not a monthly fee.

Tomen.app's answer

I wanted to get back into reading and couldn't find a reader I liked. The good-looking ones were storefronts first — they read what they sold, and the books I already owned didn't fit. The ones that took any file looked like they'd been built to manage files, not to read. I wanted something that felt premium, took whatever I had, and that I'd actually want to open at the end of a day. So I built it. Tomen puts your own books — EPUBs, comics, a Calibre library of twenty years — on a shelf you want to open, with pages set with real typography and a journal of your reading life. You buy it once, and what you read in it is yours. Later, a marketplace of independent writers selling DRM-free books will sit inside it: the same idea, one step further.

Tomen.app's answer

A single-codebase web app — plain JavaScript, no framework — served as a PWA and wrapped with Tauri for Android and Windows, so every platform runs the same reader. Books are parsed and stored on the device (IndexedDB), sync runs on Supabase, the site and reader are on Cloudflare, payments through Polar.