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The new reading stack

macwright.com

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Re: The new reading stack

#51

Post by dexterdog »

lallysingh wrote: post #23
philips wrote: post #4

I find https://readwise.io is a valuable tool for retaining ideas from what I read. That tool helps to gather book quotes from ebooks and physical books and then uses spaced repetition to remind you of quotes over time. Personally I have never really used a tracking tool like Italic Type because I didn't feel compelled to enter all of the metadata for what felt like an unknown resulting value. But I do juggle 3-4 boo…

I love readwise, but the lack of math formatting support really hurts.

I also can't justify $100/yr for something like this.

Re: The new reading stack

#52

Post by binaryorganic »

I’ve been using StoryGraph the last couple of months as a GoodReads alternative, and it’s been great!

I’m not interested in the social side of GoodReads very much, so the network effect wasn’t much of a pain point in jumping ship.

Re: The new reading stack

#53

Post by herewegoagain2 »

dalai wrote: post #47
herewegoagain2 wrote: post #19

I've decided to get rid of Amazon, and ebooks are one of the difficult issues. Are there no independent sites like goodreads or LibraryThing left? I don't really need the tracking, but the discovery. Also I have found that actually ebooks are sometimes cheaper on other places than Amazon, so a price comprison would be good. It could be integrated into a site like LibraryThings- LibraryThing already has it to some ext…

For discovery I still use LibraryThing. It is also possible to use it without an account, with some more work. The UX is not great though. Thalia has curated reviews from their librarians and a book graph with recommendations. The coverage is not superb, but if you happen to find 1-2 librarians with similar tastes, you can get some ideas. I don’t care much about the price comparison, I mostly just buy from ebooks.de…

True overall the price is probably not that significant. I appear to have bought about 250 ebooks for my Kindle over several years. So even if I had saved 2€ for every one of them (which would be a lot), it probably wouldn't really warrant a lot of effort.

Re: The new reading stack

#54

Post by mdoms »

I buy most of my e-books on kobo and directly from independent publishers and authors. I don't track my reading and I can't even begin to imagine why you would. I read for me, not for social media.

I never buy anything from Amazon, ever, and I never will.

Re: The new reading stack

#55

Post by DC1350 »

I don’t understand why people care about local book stores if not for the atmosphere. Buying online from local stores makes no sense. The store doesn’t make the books. They’re exactly the same thing no matter where you buy them from. “Local” book stores just buy books online and then resell them so what could you possibly gain from not just buying on Amazon?

Re: The new reading stack

#56

Post by detaro »

DC1350 wrote: post #55

I don’t understand why people care about local book stores if not for the atmosphere. Buying online from local stores makes no sense. The store doesn’t make the books. They’re exactly the same thing no matter where you buy them from. “Local” book stores just buy books online and then resell them so what could you possibly gain from not just buying on Amazon?

You gain a higher chance of the bookstore being around when you want to go there for the atmosphere in the future. (and if I don't want a specific book right now, the people at my local bookstore are quite good at recommending things. And some people don't want to support Amazon)

Re: The new reading stack

#57

Post by willisrocks »

As a heavy reader, for fun and for work, I need to be able to track what I've read just to be able to figure out the name of the author of those books I really liked a couple of years ago. The one feature that I've yet to find in something like Goodreads is notifications of when new books from an author you like are coming out. For me, that would be a killer feature.

Re: The new reading stack

#59

Post by Raidion »

stack_underflow wrote: post #50
matesz wrote: post #39

The best thing about reading technical books is that it naturally leads one to get aquainted deeper with the topic at hand. Usually many ideas spawn out of some brilliant work which is published for a while already and its really worthwhile to try to track down those. Knowing history makes it easier to understand works which in some way depend on the original, even small bits - something called syntopical reading. Wh…

I feel like I'm on one extreme of this spectrum which is: I 'need' to develop a deep understanding of systems from the bottom-up and only then can I feel comfortable building on top of it/abstracting it away/being productive with it. When I started learning socket programming I didn't feel completely comfortable with using it until I had a complete understanding of the networking stack from the PHY upward. I even nee…

You just have an interest in different parts of the stack. Someone could write the same thing, but instead talk about why they needed to understand how the computer hardware was implemented to run the programs and even needed to build a small computer themselves to get a feeling for what the computer was "actually doing".

Alternately, at a systems design level, the constraint may not actually be the implementation of the components, but the organization and production of the system. This could be a simple CRUD app, where the business domain is more important, or the manufacturing of a new toy, where cost retooling and speed of production matters significantly more than trying to make the toy of a slightly higher quality.

There is a LOT of complexity out there in the world, and most people (on hacker news especially) gravitate towards parts of that complexity that interests them. A lot of other people gravitate towards different problems, which is a good thing, because it takes all sorts of specialties to get something nifty off the ground.

Re: The new reading stack

#60

Post by bwb »

I am working on a book discovery website and automating book metadata is expensive and hard. Cover images are poor quality - even from paid companies like Ingram. I am starting with manual data entry and getting cover images from publishers or authors. I plan to test some of the API sources later this year to figure out which might be a good choice (Ingram's ONIX or API is def the highest quality).

I am trying to make book discovery like browsing the best bookstore in the world. I want to recreate the experience of walking through the shelves, seeing a little note with a staff favorite, and so on. Aiming to launch mid April at Shepherd.com! If you want to follow my notes as I build it (http://build.shepherd.com/).

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