In 2014, I added configuration options to GNOME Documents so that it would start listing types of files it didn’t before: out with LibreOffice docs, and in with Comic Book archives. It advertised itself as GNOME Books. In 2016, it gained support for showing ePub files, and finally in 2019, it was split off from GNOME Documents in time for GNOME 3.32 to become its own independent application.
Unfortunately, because my goal was always for this application to run on a tablet, and that I have not been able to find a tablet that was 100% supported, stable, under Linux[1], I’ve decided that it’s better if I pass the baton on to somebody else.
GNOME Books is written in Javascript, and uses GTK3 and Tracker. It receives about 10 new installs a day on Flathub:
where it uses a stand-alone, embedded Tracker.
If you’re interested in maintaining GNOME Books, the power of your GNOME account will allow you to modify the DOAP file, and take over from me without a problem.
I will continue to maintain the Comics backend for evince, which GNOME Books used, and I’m happy to answer questions about that, or the Flatpak manifest, in the app, or on Flathub. I’m afraid that I can’t answer questions about GNOME Books’ code itself, it never really was the focus of my work.
Cheers
[1]: As a side note, I have worked quite a lot on hardware support for tablets, the goodix and rtl8723bs drivers in the kernel are results of that work.