Show HN: Blen – A Minimalist EReader to Help You Read More Books

2 johntawfik 2 7/31/2025, 8:22:13 PM blen.ink ↗

Hi HN,

Most of our attention today is hijacked by short-form content on apps like TikTok and X. There's growing evidence this contributes to cognitive decline (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11236742/) and is only going to affect more people as video generation models advance.

One of the best ways to combat this is by reading more books. I built blen to help myself do this, and figured other people might want to join me.

Blen is a minimalistic PDF e-reader with a clean interface, bookmark and search features, and automatic progress tracking. Just put blen.ink/ in front of a url to a PDF of your favorite book (eg: blen.ink/https://www.sausd.us/cms/lib/CA01000471/Centricity/Domain/24...) or add the link within our interface.

There are no sign-ups, no paywall, no collection of your personal data, and blen will always be free.

I hope it helps you read more. I’d love any thoughts, feedback, or feature requests!

Comments (2)

johntawfik · 19h ago

Just fixed an issue that affected fetching some urls, if anyone had an error please try again :)

johntawfik · 19h ago

Also just fixed issues with page spacing on mobile, if you run into any other issues please let me know!

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Show HN: Blen – A Minimalist EReader to Help You Read More Books

Comments (2)