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Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#21

Post by albertshin »

I love this idea. I always stash articles into Pocket, Evernote and by the time I get around to them it feels more like a chore to get around reading them in order... I feel like making this into a book adds a little serendipity to the experience since I can just open to a random article.

A suggestion: maybe some auto tagging and ordering the articles by topic or source? It might not be that technically expensive to do + adds to the organization value? I hate when I browse my to-read list and I just find a sea of productivity or tech articles when I really just don't want to see those that day.

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#22

Post by wool_gather »

albertshin wrote: post #14
wool_gather wrote: post #8

Not to say that I don't think this is cool, but it seems impossible. How are you going to deal with the copyright issues of commercially printing work by arbitrary authors? (Not the part where you reformat stuff for a user to print at home -- the other part where you print it for them.)

I haven't looked too closely at how this works, but regarding your concern, don't other printing services run this risk too if that's illegal? like Kinkos, FedEx, library printers?

I don't know where the line is (and I think it's pretty fuzzy and dependent on someone actually noticing and caring), but copy shops will certainly refuse to reprint an entire book for you.

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#24

Post by mttjj »

albertshin wrote: post #14
wool_gather wrote: post #8

Not to say that I don't think this is cool, but it seems impossible. How are you going to deal with the copyright issues of commercially printing work by arbitrary authors? (Not the part where you reformat stuff for a user to print at home -- the other part where you print it for them.)

I haven't looked too closely at how this works, but regarding your concern, don't other printing services run this risk too if that's illegal? like Kinkos, FedEx, library printers?

Any time you print something at FedEx they make you accept an agreement stating that you are not printing or copying copyrighted material. I'm guessing those other places have the same type of thing. Even if it's a piece of paper posted next to the printer at a public library stating "By using this printer you acknowledge that you are not printing or copying any material for which you do not have the right to copy."

To be sure, it's a pretty loose contract and you could probably get away with printing a small amount of copyrighted material. But it at least shifts the liability onto the customer so the retailer can always point to the agreement and say "hey, they said they weren't printing anything illegally; that's on them for lying."

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#25

Post by biztos »

I watched the video demo and I like the idea that I might easily get a PDF with nicer formatting than the default print styles. I would use that sometimes.

However, I question whether this will work consistently, since in my experience it takes a lot of developer attention to cover all the design anti-patterns out there.

It's a classic problem of course but I don't see why this is better than using something like Pocket, which has enough traction to get parsing right most of the time even if its print style might be less nice. It also has good integration with my e-reader.

For the intended physical-book version, I think you're setting yourself up for serious copyright problems. You're going to republish the Wall Street Journal because one of its readers asked you to?

Anyway it looks like a fun project and I wish you luck with it!

Regarding the video I'd like to point out:

1. It makes the service look really slow! Probably not what you want!

2. The video ends with an ad for the video hosting company, which I found confusing at first.

[edit: less speculation]

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#26

Post by hinkley »

wool_gather wrote: post #16
hinkley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time and location shifting are protected, at least in the US. And with the exception of software that aggressively tries to prevent doing so, backups are also considered fair use. If you share the material with someone else, you're into infringement territory in most of the 1st World and substantially beyond, as far as I'm aware. If I tried to do this as a service, I'd probably get sued to the stone age, and I'd dese…

> If I tried to do this as a service Isn't that what this post is about? They are planning to print a physical book made up of arbitrary text chosen by the user and then ship that book to the user.

Somehow I missed the lede. You are correct, he is doing exactly that.

So my conclusion is bunk, although the decision tree I loosely mapped out might still be useful for others so I'll leave it as is.

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#27

Post by yorgos_kats »

albertshin wrote: post #21

I love this idea. I always stash articles into Pocket, Evernote and by the time I get around to them it feels more like a chore to get around reading them in order... I feel like making this into a book adds a little serendipity to the experience since I can just open to a random article. A suggestion: maybe some auto tagging and ordering the articles by topic or source? It might not be that technically expensive to…

Thanks for sharing that and agreed, shouldn't be that hard to add to the app.

Interested about the serendipity idea, we have thought about it more from the point of view that user builds the book chapters. Would randomly selecting articles for a subscription type service (say deliver a book every month) make sense to you?

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#28

Post by Willamin »

Your service looks really neat! Is there a way I can use it without the extension? For example, can I paste a url into the website?

I use Safari as my primary browser and am not interested at switching browsers at this time. However I am interested in trying My Screen Break!

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#29

Post by yorgos_kats »

Willamin wrote: post #28

Your service looks really neat! Is there a way I can use it without the extension? For example, can I paste a url into the website? I use Safari as my primary browser and am not interested at switching browsers at this time. However I am interested in trying My Screen Break!

Thanks! You can try with a url here (https://demo.myscreenbreak.com/) but we are going to sunset this soon. We may add this within the app, but will create a safari extension as well.

Generally the main reason going through via extension is that we can then provide the service to paid content users have access to and we don't. There are other technical considerations too.

Re: Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book

#30

Post by yorgos_kats »

biztos wrote: post #25

I watched the video demo and I like the idea that I might easily get a PDF with nicer formatting than the default print styles. I would use that sometimes. However, I question whether this will work consistently, since in my experience it takes a lot of developer attention to cover all the design anti-patterns out there. It's a classic problem of course but I don't see why this is better than using something like Poc…

Thanks for this comment and taking the time, lot to unpack.

From a technical standpoint, you are correct that this is a massive challenge. However for us to eventually get something print production ready, we needed to build our own extraction software that preserves stylesheet, images, sequence etc. We will definitely face a lot of failures initially, but hopefully will be able to build interesting machine learning models that will make the service much better over time. We have already built tools that will enable us to fix most of the possible issues pre-production.

About the legal concerns, we will be printing content, we know 100% user already has access to, for its personal use. Won't be any different than creating a pdf file (eg from file print) and going to a print shop with a usb to print it out (or stitch).

Regarding the video, it is slow, but this is the best we have made it to snapshot html, send it to our servers and extract the relevant info. We aim to make it faster, but that's the reality and didn't want to show anything fake. Rendering could take even longer depending on size etc, obv tons of room for optimisation.

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