A few years ago when Stable Diffusion was released, I happened to be reading Homer's Iliad and came across a section where Achilles' shield is described in great detail. I fed the passage into Stable Diffusion, wondering how well it would do in creating an illustration of the shield. Of course it was terrible, but a year later DALL-E 3 seemed to do a pretty good job, as long as you didn't look too hard at the details. By then I had been reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yes I had been on a classics binge), and created a Python app that let me feed random paragraphs into DALL-E 3. The results were often grand collages that seemed to look like a combination of Renaissance art and graffiti.

After playing around with this idea for a bit, I realized it would be pretty cool to have a dedicated app that could download public-domain books and illustrate them with DALL-E 3. I have been working on this idea for a few years, at first copying code back and forth from Xcode to the ChatGPT prompt, and then later using Claude Code. I didn't know anything about developing for the iPhone, and had to tackle a broad range of issues, everything from setting up a serverless backend to writing code in Swift to releasing an app on the App Store. Technical issues as mundane as how to parse an EPUB correctly or how to create an engaging UI/UX were surprisingly complex.

Now this work has finally culminated in an app I call ParaGraFX: a free-to-download EPUB book reader with built-in text-to-image generation. This app is designed to make public-domain books easy to download and illustrate, with download tools for Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, and The Internet Archive, and illustrations powered by fal.ai and OpenAI.

To get started just download the app and open one of the bundled books to start reading. At the bottom of the screen is a button labeled 'Illustrate', which can create an illustration based on selected text or the text on screen. Are you reading the section in Alice in Wonderland about the Mad Hatter's tea party? Just hit 'Illustrate' and you will be served with a custom illustration in one of three dozen styles — from Romantic oil painting, Japanese woodblock print and Art Deco poster to Byzantine mosaic, a cross-stitch sampler, 16-bit pixel art, or 1980s teletext block graphics. You can modify the generated illustration by either editing the original prompt, or providing custom instructions, such as adding the Queen of Hearts in the background.

This app is free to download and use for reading EPUBs, but since images cost money to generate, they are paid for with credits. The first 3 credits are free, and additional credits are available for purchase starting at $1.99 for 10 credits. There are 4 tiers of image quality that cost different numbers of credits, with the Fast tier costing 1 credit per image, and 5 credits for the Best tier, which uses OpenAI's top image model. (The free 3 credits are restricted to the Fast tier.)

I invite you to try it out and give me feedback in the comments. Whether you want to use it as a serious reader, or want to surf from book to book just to create illustrations, ParaGraFX grew out of the simple pleasure of illustrating the classics.