[HN Gopher] Show HN: Pageturner - a community for building a rea...
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Show HN: Pageturner - a community for building a reading habit
Author : bcye
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-02-16 10:54 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joinpageturner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joinpageturner.com)
| moksha256 wrote:
| Very nice and elegant idea.
|
| I run a book-discovery extension full of bibliophiles who might
| really like this...would be interested to hear what you have in
| mind for developing this further.
|
| What's a good way to get in touch? Email embedded in your public
| key?
| bcye wrote:
| Can you use the live chat on the website?
| marckohlbrugge wrote:
| Cool idea! I've seen some people on WIP use it for building a
| reading habit, but a community focused on it makes a lot of
| sense. Would be interesting to see more excerpts and discussions.
| Turning it into a habit-forming bookclub.
| bcye wrote:
| Thank you :) WIP and Makerlog were my inspiration, I noticed
| how effective streaks and logging were for building in public,
| so I wanted to build a reading community around it.
| samstave wrote:
| Aren't these called "book clubs"
| bcye wrote:
| No, Pageturner is also about discovering new books by seeing
| what other people are reading. Afaik, everyone reads the same
| book in a book club, please correct me if I'm wrong.
| ab-dm wrote:
| As someone that avidly uses goodreads (but wishes there was a
| non-Amazon option instead) this is really interesting.
|
| After signing up and using it for a bit, here are some thoughts:
|
| - Allow us to use progress instead of page. For kindle/audiobook
| users, progress is pretty important.
|
| - Some sort of Goodreads integration, where I can import my
| current books (I know the goodreads API is terrible and getting
| worse, but it would be cool)
|
| - I tried logging into the PWA, but it just keeps hanging after
| tapping login (showing the loading indiciator)
| daltonlp wrote:
| > As someone that avidly uses goodreads (but wishes there was a
| non-Amazon option instead) this is really interesting.
|
| I recently ditched goodreads and have no regrets :)
|
| Here are all the alternatives I evaluated:
| https://bookapps.info
| bcye wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback :)
| ppezaris wrote:
| > Streak: You add points to your streak every time you post. Read
| and post at least once a week to continue your streak.
|
| does this imply that the expectation is that you read a book a
| week? (just curious)
| bcye wrote:
| Yes.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Not sure how I feel about the gamification of reading. At the low
| end, you're probably better off not reading at all if the
| alternative is, say, anything by Tom Clancy or Jason Calacanis.
| So spend your willpower on something meaningful.
|
| And even for higher quality literature, is it really "a person
| that reads this" that you want to be, or rather "the kind of
| person that enjoys reading this". You can force the first, but
| the second is more doubtful.
|
| I guess that's what they are getting at with the "building a
| reading habit" phrasing, and there's little to lose in trying.
| technotarek wrote:
| This seems a bit extreme. Is anything that is incentivized bad?
| Charitable giving? Putting solar on your house? Obviously those
| are monetary incentives, but goosing desired behaviors with
| incentives of any form kind of makes the world go round (or at
| least it would seem so when you're a father of a young child!).
| dmje wrote:
| I think I'd turn it around and instead say: "does everything
| have to be incentivised"?
|
| I mean, I'm all for being encouraged, but there's a fine line
| between incentives and feeling pressured. A big bit of me
| thinks: if you genuinely want to read more, you'll read more,
| and probably don't need a website to help you do so.
| habosa wrote:
| In the age of Twitter and Instagram it's not really productive
| to insult book readers for reading the "wrong" books. I don't
| want us to lose reading.
|
| (Also Rainbow Six was sweet)
| Bakary wrote:
| A more charitable version of their argument would be that
| reading isn't a worthwhile activity by itself. It has been
| marketed as such given the context of screens, but it is not
| magically more stimulating on its own than most other
| activities, nor are Twitter and co. magically unstimulating
| on their own. Plenty of people torture themselves with trying
| to start a reading habit when their heart isn't in it, and
| often gain very marginal benefits out of it compared to other
| forms of light entertainment they could find more enjoyable.
| For people who do enjoy it naturally, there is obviously
| nothing wrong with it. But I notice that online platforms
| discussing books are rife with anxiety on the number of books
| read, the "productivity" of it, and are filled with articles
| about the benefits of reading.
|
| Essentially, the attitude we have towards books is a form of
| cargo-culting. It's not the reading itself that is important,
| but getting exposed to new thoughts, knowledge, and
| perceptions and synthesizing them over time.
| powersurge360 wrote:
| You're made of what you consume. That's as true of ideas as it
| is for food. Forcing the first will, over time, effect degrees
| of the second. Wanting to like something is already a large
| portion of the way to actually liking something.
|
| Sure, it won't be universally true and you can't will yourself
| to like everything, but I think more often than not if you want
| to do something you will be grateful for having done it.
| [deleted]
| technotarek wrote:
| This immediately caught my attention. I wouldn't say I'm a book
| lover (at this very moment). Rather, I used to be a veracious
| book reader, but then life, social media and the Internet got in
| the way. I'm lucky if I read one full length novel per year now.
| I regret that and have been actively wanting to regain my former
| interest/habit. Your site could help. But here's what I was
| expecting/hoping to find when I clicked through...something that
| would help me discover new books. After looking at the first
| several posts, all I saw were non-fiction, business-focused
| books. Is there a way to hone in on fiction and specific sub-
| genres? If I can easily see what, for example, other people who
| like science fiction are reading right now and actively
| discussing, then I've got a starting point. Further, I know where
| to go back to when I pick up that book and want to share my own
| thoughts.
|
| I really like the premise/idea as whole. Good luck.
| bcye wrote:
| Thank you :)
|
| This is my plan for the future actually, to filter your feed to
| genres/people/books you subscribe to. But until today, only 2
| people have been actively using it (as you might have seen),
| and we happen to read a lot of business books. But I'll
| integrate this feature when there's a greater diversity of
| posts (which you can contribute to ;))
| x86ARMsRace wrote:
| I love your idea, and this is something I can see myself
| using (and very well might!). What would really be the killer
| feature for me would be something that would let me view a
| collection of discussion about a specific book I'm reading
| (ie: view all posts about Tractatus). That, and the filter by
| genre feature.
| bcye wrote:
| You can already, each book has it's own discussion feed at
| joinpageturner.com/b/isbn13ofthebookhere
|
| You can also find it via joinpageturner.com/search
|
| But as there still aren't too many posts, you probably
| won't see other people talking about it yet. But you can
| totally get your friends to join Pageturner and read the
| book you're reading and have a discussion there.
|
| The filter function is going to include books you've read,
| saved and genres you're interested in.
| bcye wrote:
| This is basically a chicken and egg problem :/
| vlunkr wrote:
| I'm curious if you've tried Goodreads? It has both personalized
| recommendations and tons of lists, as well as social aspects
| that you can choose to use or ignore. Not exactly the same as
| Pageturner, which looks interesting, but it's definitely been a
| part of helping me get back into reading.
| technotarek wrote:
| I haven't, but will likely give it a try when I get back on
| the reading (books) horse. I wish it weren't owned by Amazon.
| de-FAANGing is too hard!
| dmje wrote:
| If you want a great recommendation engine for books, check
| out https://abooklikefoo.com/
|
| Also, but for music and tv as well as books,
| https://tastedive.com/ has always suggested some
| interesting stuff.
| aninuth wrote:
| Check out The StoryGraph (https://app.thestorygraph.com/)! Is
| not Amazon-owned, and while it's not built to be a Goodreads
| replacement per se, it's been super helpful for discovering
| new reads and I like the review/tagging system better than
| GR.
| [deleted]
| diimdeep wrote:
| I better track my reading and save quotes somewhere locally or on
| the platform I know still be around in a month or in ten years.
| Otherwise good try to crowdsource generate interesting quotes
| with affiliate amazon links.
| bcye wrote:
| I understand that, I'd always allow users to export their data
| before shutting something down.
|
| Don't understand the second part? You mean I should try to
| source quotes from Amazon reviews?
| lt_snuffles wrote:
| Cool idea there are several UnCaught Promise error (I think
| related to auth function). Hope it helps
|
| ``` Error: Request failed with status code 403 at fc68df5cafe0959
| d71c7ddced81319c8bd18ad55.8929fc3232571246e5ea.js?__WB_REVISION__
| =30b9439112758a5b55648404f18dbb03:1 at fc68df5cafe0959d71c7ddced8
| 1319c8bd18ad55.8929fc3232571246e5ea.js?__WB_REVISION__=30b9439112
| 758a5b55648404f18dbb03:1 at XMLHttpRequest.<anonymous> (fc68df5ca
| fe0959d71c7ddced81319c8bd18ad55.8929fc3232571246e5ea.js?__WB_REVI
| SION__=30b9439112758a5b55648404f18dbb03:1) at XMLHttpRequest.r
| (_app-dc4e7bee69cae42377f5.js?__WB_REVISION__=0be3e881fe087714d35
| 5d6124086839d:1) ```
| bcye wrote:
| Hi thank you for sending it. I'm getting those in Sentry and
| still trying to figure out what's causing them.
| bcye wrote:
| Fixed.
| episode0x01 wrote:
| Looks really cool. Looks like I'm now hitting an unexpected error
| when trying to load the page
| bcye wrote:
| let me look into that :/
| russnewcomer wrote:
| I am getting the same thing when connected via corporate VPN
| that blocks certain kinds of sites/adtrackers/etc. I don't get
| it when not connected via VPN - if I had to guess, I'd guess
| that you are not handling some error related to that as
| gracefully as possible.
|
| edit:Whoops, meant to reply to bcye's sibling comment.
| Apologies.
| bcye wrote:
| Just sent out an email. It works again.
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(page generated 2021-02-16 23:02 UTC)