The is a Web-based application used to interactively read a set of four books:
- Emma by Jane Austen
- The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau
Through the use of this tool the active reader (you) will enhance their use and understanding of the corpus. The whole thing kinda, sorta works like a back-of-the-book index but on steroids.
Requirements
Reader Lite ought to run on any computer with Python version 3.12 or greater installed.
Installation
First, Reader Lite is a Python application. Open your terminal and run the following command, and version number greater than or equal to 3.12 ought to work:
python --version
Second, Reader Lite requires the installation of Ollama, a tool making it easy to run generative-AI applications on your local computer. Visit https://ollama.com/download and install Ollama. It is not hard. I promise.
Third, Reader Lite is configured to use two specific large language mnodels. Open your terminal and install LLama2:
ollama pull llama2:latest
Then install nomic-embed-text:
ollama pull nomic-embed-text:latest
Fourth, as if this writing, Reader Lite can only be downloaded from GitHub. Open your terminal and run the following command which will download the Reader Lite software. Mind you, since the application includes a number of indexes, the download is not small, but it is not too big either:
git clone https://github.com/ericleasemorgan/reader-lite.git
Fifth, install the software, and begin by changing directories to where the software was downloaded:
cd reader-lite
Use pip to do the actual installation, and power-users may want to install the tool in a virtual environment:
pip install .
If you got this far, then the hard parts are complete.
Sixth, launch Reader Lite with the following command:
flask --app reader_lite run --debug
Finally, open http://127.0.0.1:5000 in your Web browser, and you ought to see something very similar to the following:
Congratuations, you have successfully installed and launched Reader Lite. Whew.
Next time, just run the following command to pick up where you left off:
flask --app reader_lite run --debug
While I can write rubust Python applications, I am still rusty on the writing of Python installation tools. Any help with the above instructions would be greatly appreciated!
Eric Lease Morgan <eric_morgan@infomotions.com>
September 29, 2025