Contesoir — audiobook and ebook app
Listen to audiobooks, read ebooks and a magazine in French or English on your phone, and subscribe or buy a title with mobile money or a card.
Full size- What I was testing
- Whether one phone-first app could carry audiobooks, ebooks and a magazine in two languages, with mobile money as the main way to pay.
- What I found
- Mobile money fails in ways a card doesn't: the balance is too low, the person declines the request on their phone, or the request never arrives. So each of those gets its own message and next step, rather than one generic error.
Contesoir is a reading and listening app I built for a fictional francophone subscription service: audiobooks, ebooks and a magazine, in French and English, paid for mainly by mobile money. The service’s name, titles, authors and narrators in the demo are placeholders.
Built for listening on a phone
The audiobook player has chapters, playback speed, a sleep timer that fades out before it pauses, bookmarks and a saved position, and it carries on in a mini-player as you browse. Ebooks open in a paginated reader with themes and text size, and the magazine renders from a real PDF with thumbnails and zoom. Free listeners get preview chapters, then a clear choice to subscribe or buy. The app can be installed on the home screen and switches between French and English, light and dark.
The money side, simulated
Checkout simulates a mobile money request to the phone and a hosted card page, including the ways a payment can fail, and a renewal that fails keeps the reader subscribed through a grace period. Authors have a studio to submit manuscripts, which an admin reviews, and they see statements built from qualified reading and listening under versioned royalty rules. The admin side also covers refunds and manual payments to authors.
All of it is hand-built HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Sign-in, payments and royalties run in the browser for the demo; no real money moves.
