Introducing Solarium
Less is the point
The Daylight Computer Company’s flagship device is the Daylight DC-1, a specialized Android tablet with a screen that looks and feels like paper. During the day, you read by the light in the room — sunlight, a desk lamp, whatever’s there. It doesn’t even need to be a room at all. It runs at 60fps, works in direct sunlight, and in the evening or low light you can turn on its warm amber backlight, so as not to disrupt your circadian rhythm.
I bought one because I read a lot1, and I like to take physical notes, and I’d grown tired of reading on screens that were designed to do everything except help me read. I was compelled by its premise: a humanistic computing environment. A device that does less so you can do more.
One snag: I have near a gazillion books purchased through Apple Books née iBooks, dutifully accumulated through the years. And of course — of course — I can’t read any of them on my Daylight. They’re wrapped in DRM, locked to Apple’s ecosystem, visible only through Apple’s apps on Apple’s devices2. I paid for them. I can’t move them. There is something profoundly absurd about holding a beautiful piece of purpose-built reading hardware that can’t access the books I own.
So I did what I’d already done when streaming services couldn’t be trusted with my movie collection, I drew closer to DRM-free ePubs. And when I set up my NAS and Jellyfin server for media, standing up Calibre alongside it was a logical step. One box, serving movies and books to every device in the house.
That left the client. The ePub reader story on the Daylight, and the Android ecosystem as a whole, is… fine. I’ve been a Moon+ Reader user. It works, but it doesn’t feel at home on the DC1. It still renders skeuomorphic wooden bookshelves — a visual metaphor designed for a vivid LCD display — and it features prominently its ability to highlight text in many different colors. Other Android readers have the same problem: they assume a backlit, full-color canvas, and on the DC1 their UIs collapse into grey ambiguity.
So I built my own. I call it…
Solarium
Solarium is an ePub reader designed for the Daylight DC-1’s LivePaper display. It’s built greyscale first: every element is legible and clear on a monochrome screen, and color is an enhancement, not a requirement. It’s free. It’s on Google Play. And it’s the first consumer application from Wunsch Werks.
The feature I cared about most was the simplest to describe and the hardest to get right: I wanted the books on my server to live alongside the books downloaded locally to my device. Not in a separate tab or behind some opaque sync ritual. Just one library, one shelf, spread across multiple sources. There to download when I’m ready.
Solarium connects to OPDS servers — an open standard for browsing and downloading books, like RSS for your library. Point it at a Calibre Content Server, Calibre-Web, Komga, or Kavita.
Beyond that, Solarium does less than most ePub readers. On purpose.
No reading streaks. No AI summaries. No social sharing. No gamification of the deeply private act of sitting with a book. The feature set is: house your books, let you read them, get out of the way. There are bookmarks, highlights, and stylus-drawn annotations, because the DC1 ships with a Wacom EMR pen and scribbling in the margins is one of readings great pleasures.
To get started reading, Solarium ships with three of my personal favorites: Walden, Leaves of Grass, and Meditations. Or connect immediately to the vast library of Project Gutenberg.
That’s it. That’s the app.
You can just build things.
I should note: I had never written a line of Kotlin before this project. I’d never built an Android app. Wunsch Werks is a software consultancy — we advise, we build for clients, we think about systems and architecture and quality for other people’s products. My own background is in Ruby, Scala, Clojure, TypeScript, Racket. Not Jetpack Compose.
For building Solarium, I worked with GasTown, Codex, and Claude Code. This is an AI-assisted project in the truest sense. The rendering engine is Readium, an open-source toolkit that powers institutional and library reading applications
A year ago I couldn’t have done this; not at this pace. The tools haven’t removed the need to understand what you’re building — they’ve removed the tax on building it somewhere unfamiliar. I know how a reading app should work. I know what good software architecture looks like. I’ve shipped products for fifteen years. What I didn’t know was Kotlin, and that turned out to be the smallest problem in the room.
Solarium is in active development. It’s built around what I need as a reader, and it changes when my needs do. It reads ePubs well, it looks at home on the DC1, and it respects your books enough to not try to be anything more than a place to read them. I’ve used it regularly for over a month, and I have no gripes.
Solarium works on any Android tablet (or phone). You don’t need a Daylight DC1, but if you want one use coupon code wunsch for $25 off. If you do have one, I think you’ll feel the difference — an app designed for that screen, instead of merely running on it.
In 2007, Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Music”, an open letter calling on the music industry to abandon DRM entirely. The music labels eventually did. Apple Books, meanwhile, still sells DRM-locked ePubs in 2026. The letter has since been removed from Apple’s website.