Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

notimeforbooks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 80 posts

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#61

Post by steven_pack »

zackproser wrote: post #57

This is awesome, Steven! Well done.

Thanks Zack! (Full disclosure, I work with Zack at Cloudflare on the Product team). The fact I could build the whole thing on Cloudflare Workers is one of the reasons I took it as far as I did. I like writing code, but i groan at the thought of setting up servers, even on the cloud. My last side project used ELBs with a node server and the whole thing was painful.

Having an API that deploys to ~200 cities instantly and then deploying the UI being as simple as wrangler deploy, pointing at my bundle directory means I could just focus on the fun stuff.

Can't wait to see where we go with this platform.

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#62

Post by steven_pack »

hwestiii wrote: post #60

Is this supposed to be _new_? I was subscribed to a service called Daily Lit 10 or 15 years ago that did the same thing.

Erm... new for me? I typed a 'page per day' in Google and didn't find what I was looking for. In essence, it's serializing books, which has been done for > 100 years. I have some more ideas as to where I'd like to take it though.

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#63

Post by aspaviento »

steven_pack wrote: post #31
aspaviento wrote: post #11

I don't get what's the point on this. In my opinion a single page has barely content enough to develop anything interesting and because of it, it could be quite difficult to bring the context of the previous page every day you read a new one. I can't see how one can get hooked to read a book this way.

It's an experiment really. I probably should have included the origin story somewhere... I was driving across the U.S. listening to an audio book about American History. Each chapter the author would mention influential books of the time. I was really impacted by the chapter on slavery and really wanted to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Whilst I've got through plenty of classics, with a job and family, I thought it was unli…

It definitely helps to understand the purpose of the service :) it doesn't match with my reading habits but I'm sure many others will be interested. Good luck!

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#64

Post by fitzroy »

I've keep pitching friends on the idea of "Infinite Text" (Infinite Jest, one sentence at a time in text messages).

Also, Tolstoy's 'War 'n Pieces'.

That said, a page/day via email and using public domain works seem like a better compromise.

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#66

Post by pgt »

steven_pack wrote: post #33
pgt wrote: post #15

Now if only you could geofence this to restrooms all over the world so it will send you a page as a push notification...while you push. I'm calling it: Push to Read™️

Thanks for taking the time to come up with that. :p My first job was at a supermarket. There was a big sign on the door saying "NO NEWSPAPERS". Memories.

There’s a Seinfeld episode about books in the toilet: https://youtu.be/NygOFsExGMU

And tabloids would sell more if they were 2-ply.

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#67

Post by jon-wood »

officemonkey wrote: post #22

Your thumbnail of the Iliad is of the Robert Fagles translation, which is not in the public domain. I'm not sure that many people would want MORE email. Years ago, I did something like this with Samuel Pepys' diary. I didn't get more than a week in and then I forgot. It was easy to get overwhelmed with the backlog and then I unsubscribed from the RSS feed. I'm not sure that people have "no time for books." There's pl…

Slightly OT, but if you want to read Samuel Pepys there’s a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/samuelpepys which is posting his diary in (more or less) real-time as if he had been tweeting rather than writing a diary. It works surprisingly well, and was honestly quite moving as they went through the Great Fire of London a while back.

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#68

Post by silverreads »

Last week I wrote a shell one liner to find all the chapter titles in a book's ToC, grab the line numbers for each chapter start in the text, and head/tail the text into individual chapter files. These files are then sent to me via jabber one per morning and discarded.

I just finished part 1 of a tale of two cities this way.

Re: Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox

#69

Post by steven_pack »

silverreads wrote: post #68

Last week I wrote a shell one liner to find all the chapter titles in a book's ToC, grab the line numbers for each chapter start in the text, and head/tail the text into individual chapter files. These files are then sent to me via jabber one per morning and discarded. I just finished part 1 of a tale of two cities this way.

Nice. I thought of doing a similar thing, but being a recovering startup guy, I was like, I should totally build this as a platform and let others read books this way. :p

Plus, a big part of why I kept going with it was because I wanted to see how far I could push Cloudflare Workers as a pure app development platform... pretty far it turns out! (disclosure: I work at Cloudflare, although not on the Workers team).

Post reply on HN