Ἡρακλῆς — An Interactive Illustrated Book

Twelve impossible labors. One question: what kind of person survives becoming capable of them?

Ἡρακλῆς is a standalone illustrated reading edition about Heracles, ordeal, responsibility, strength, madness, atonement and transformation.

It is still a book.

I simply asked how much useful machinery could be built around a book without turning it into a game.

So this edition remembers your progress, lets you tune the reading environment to your eyes, contains a complete gallery of original chapter artwork, works offline, switches between Czech and English, and opens a Treasury after you complete the twelve labors.

Price: $10. Pay once. Keep it.

No subscription. No in-app currency. No microtransactions. No account required to read it. No permanent internet connection.

What you get

The complete book in English and Czech, wrapped in its own offline Windows reader.

Inside are the twelve labors of Heracles, illustrated as a coherent visual cycle, together with interludes exploring Sisyphus, Atlas and the meaning of ordeal.

The reader includes saved progress, chapter navigation, search, bookmarks, a full artwork gallery, adjustable typography, column width, paragraph spacing, light and dark reading modes, brightness and contrast controls, and focused reading.

Complete the work and the Treasury of Heracles opens.

The Treasury contains the high-resolution illustrations, a place to record what the journey left with you, and reader prices for further works in the catalogue.

Finishing the book does not require agreeing with it.

You only have to travel through it.

Why is this an application?

Because PDFs are excellent containers and terrible environments.

A book does not need XP, achievements, lootboxes or flashing buttons. But software can still make reading materially better.

It can remember where you stopped.

It can adapt the page to your eyes.

It can make thirty illustrations explorable instead of burying them between paragraphs.

It can give difficult concepts navigation and structure.

And when a book ends, it can open another door instead of simply displaying the last page.

That is what I am experimenting with here: books as owned, offline digital objects rather than rented content or disposable files.

Who made this?

My name is Rudolf Machač.

I did not come through academia, a publishing house or a software studio.

For years I worked physical jobs abroad, lifting and assembling steel while spending much of the rest of my time reading philosophy, mythology, religion, psychology and the stranger corners of human thought.

Eventually the notebooks became manuscripts.

The manuscripts became books.

And now, with modern AI tools, I can do something that would previously have required a small publisher, design team and software studio: turn those books into complete illustrated digital editions myself.

AI is part of the production process. It is not the reason these books exist.

The arguments, obsessions, research, structure and years that produced them came first. AI gave one guy with a computer the ability to actually manufacture the object around them.

I am interested in what happens when that capability is used not to mass-produce disposable content, but to make strange, dense, inexpensive books that otherwise might never have existed.

Ἡρακλῆς is the first doorway.

Ten bucks?

Yes. 🥹

I could carve the material into courses, memberships and premium tiers.

I don't particularly want to.. Give me ten bucks and the book is yours. 🥹

If you hate it, fair enough. Keep the file, curse my name and move on.. If you like it, there are more works waiting behind it — and completing this one gives you substantial reader discounts on them.

Your purchase also does something pleasantly mundane for me: it helps fund the next books, makes my own life a little easier, and, yes, helps me work toward paying down my mum's mortgage. Make this happen for us my guys. 🥹
Im giving you my magic, you give me your lunch money. 🥹

There are no investors behind this, no publishing company, no team and no debt used to manufacture it.

It's me, a computer and an increasingly suspicious quantity of books. So if this looks worth ten bucks to you: welcome aboard.