
Show HN: Notimeforbooks.com – Read a book, one page at a time, in your inbox - steven_pack
https://notimeforbooks.com
======
aspaviento
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.

~~~
steven_pack
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 unlikely I'd sit down and read it cover-to-cover.

As I thought about it more, I realized that even though I have a Kindle, I
rarely read it, but I _always_ read my email on the bus on the way to work.
So... what if I just received a page per day? The whole site is basically an
experiment to answer that question. I'm enjoying it so far, and now I'll find
out if others do too!

So far I'm finding you actually do have enough context to keep track of
things. Maybe not get hooked (but there's also a 'request another page' link
in the email for those days with bad traffic)

:)

~~~
aspaviento
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!

------
whytaka
I think this is a great idea but I echo the critique that a single page isn’t
enough.

How about if one were to be able to set their own pace? Many blog sites have
those “5minute read” things that naively just count the words or lines and map
it to some average reading speed. Maybe even have a tool that measures your
reading speed and then let users configure how many minutes of reading they
want to allot.

Another possibility is to send an email that gives you time options instead.
The email will consist of several button links (5, 10, 15min) and then each
button will take you to a server side rendered page that has the allotted
amount with a Done button at the end to bookmark the position.

Just some ideas. I would definitely sign up if it wasn’t just one page for
sure!

------
pgt
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™️

~~~
steven_pack
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.

~~~
pgt
There’s a Seinfeld episode about books in the toilet:
[https://youtu.be/NygOFsExGMU](https://youtu.be/NygOFsExGMU)

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

------
codingdave
Page breaks are not necessarily good breaks in the story. Your sample image on
your page shows that it broke in the middle of a sentence. I would think that
would make this a difficult way to read a story.

What feedback have you received about the effectiveness of "one page at a
time"?

~~~
steven_pack
Indeed. The pagination algorithm is terribly naive. It's 2000 chars x the page
you're up to. Breaking on a sentence or paragraph would be better. v1.1!

Feedback includes:

\- Some books are terrible for this, such as ones with lots of footnotes! A
page of footnotes is no fun \- Some feature requests for things like only
sending a page if you 'ack' the page you've read \- Some folks like it

------
sandoooo
Implement this as an android app instead of email. Have a system where I can
open a random page of a book in a genre as many times as I want for free, and
I can continue reading from that page, but if I read through x continuous
pages I have automatically bought the book (or a chapter of it) and it goes in
my library.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Here's a service that gives you the first page of a random book. From there
you can choose to reveal which book it is:

[https://www.recommendmeabook.com/](https://www.recommendmeabook.com/)

I think it's brilliant for getting the ball rolling, no matter how small, on a
book I would otherwise probably never read if I were just picking among
titles.

------
marai2
I actually implemented something like this for my ownself. I have a suggestion
that you may want to try out as an experiment. Somehow give the user the
ability to choose when to receive the next update (and maybe even how much).
So for example I know I'm going to be busy the next couple of days but I want
to keep the continuity, so maybe I can schedule to have only a couple of
paragraphs sent to me. Or I know I'm going to be bored out of my mind this
weekend I can schedule a page sent to me every 4 hours.

In other words if you can add this little gamification aspect and the idea
that I have or can have more active control over what's delivered to me, I
suspect you'll have better engagement. For me after the novelty of
implementing my own a-page-a-day solution wore off and when I missed a few
days then it just seemed like a chore to catch up with my missed reading.

~~~
steven_pack
Thanks for the suggestion! Glad to know I wasn't the only one that a page a
day appealed to! If you sign up, the footer of each email does actually have:
\- Request another page \- Manage \- Unsubscribe

And under Manage, you can pause, skip ahead or back etc. I decided to hold off
on any features until I saw if folks actually enjoyed consuming content this
way.

~~~
_threads
I think just basic reply commands might be cool like : « next », « next 3 » to
get 3 pages at once ... I wanted to do this with with sms or messenger or
WhatsApp bots

~~~
steven_pack
I like that, especially a chunk of pages.

SMS/WhatsApp would be a cinch, the APIs look similar to email sending APIs.
It's on my backlog, but I never actually really answered the question of why
you'd want that? When would you prefer an SMS/WhatsApp message over an email?
The biggest complaint folks have is around lack of context for a single page,
which would be exacerbated by an even shorter text message?

~~~
vezycash
A Telegram bot please.

>When would you prefer an SMS/WhatsApp message over an email?

Formatting issues with email. And I don't check my mail often, on my phone
alerts for chat is instant, email delays.

With telegram, whatever device I'm on works unlike WhatsApp.

I'm currently forwarding emails from you to Telegram but the formatting ish
remains. Some lines at the bottom are stripped.

Issue:

It would awesome if books started right at chapter 1. With mobydick, Had to
receive 15 emails of testimonials to get up chapter one.

------
officemonkey
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 plenty of time for
books. People are just not in the habit. There are ways to get into the habit,
but I don't know that one page at a time is the easiest way.

~~~
steven_pack
Oh! Thanks for the note on the cover. Will change that. Don't want any nasty
letters about copyright.

So, I agree re: the habit. I'm out of the habit, but I'm definitely _in_ the
habit of reading my email, so I guess the idea is bringing the content to
where the people are.

Definitely not clear yet if this will be 'a thing'

------
4d66ba06
Cool idea! Getting: "Request failed with status 500" when trying to subscribe
to "Walking"

~~~
steven_pack
Thanks for this... No errors in the logs, so time to review the error handling
code!

~~~
steven_pack
Ah, burned through the free limit on the email service. Back up now. :D

------
steven_pack
Maker here. AMA! Happy Thanksgiving!

~~~
Raphmedia
Hi! You should take a look at [https://mjml.io/](https://mjml.io/) (not a
service I am associated with, simply one of the easiest to use) and make a
responsive email template for your service. If you have a contact somewhere,
I'd be willing to help you out with that if you need assistance.

~~~
steven_pack
Yeah the email needs design love. Sure, I'd love to hear from you at steve at
notimeforbooks

------
cellularmitosis
I was sitting on a pile of tech book pdf's but realized I simply wasn't going
through them (and was wasting my life endlessly refreshing social media
feeds). I threw together a web service which serves up a random page from a
random book and it has been great for engaging with these books -- just enough
of a tease to make you want to dig in further.
[https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/1dabd7587662f8aa7652...](https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/1dabd7587662f8aa7652369472595806)

------
happy_path
Great idea. Subscription does not work for me at the moment but I really like
it.

Only thing I would suggest is showing some categories with several (3-4) books
in each.

~~~
steven_pack
<sigh>. A "bookshelves" page to highlight good suggestions and moving the
search up to the top are high on the list, but I'd got to the point I needed
some real user feedback to get fired up to spend some more time on it.

Thanks for the suggestion!

------
fcarraldo
Not affiliated, but I’ve been using an app called Serial Reader [0] which does
this using push notifications for some time. It’s quite good and offers more
than a page per day for those that want it.

[0] [https://www.serialreader.org/](https://www.serialreader.org/)

~~~
steven_pack
Nice -- thanks for that. Very similar approach. The "5 minutes" or "20 pages"
instead of one seems to be ringing through pretty clearly. Might make that an
option when you subscribe.

------
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.

~~~
steven_pack
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).

------
puranjay
It's a cool idea but the thought of receiving 600 emails just to read Moby
Dick is somehow making me very anxious.

------
text_exch
Anyone who enjoys this might enjoy an email newsletter I run, Thinking About
Things [1], which sends readers a single interesting and thought-provoking
link every morning. It's a similar idea - small, manageable parts of ideas for
people who are too busy to pursue idea discovery full-time.

[1] thinking-about-things.com

~~~
vovvov
Have a hard time figuring out what I'd be getting in to - I suggest you show
"Five most recent links" on the website or something along those lines

~~~
text_exch
Thank you for the feedback - I'll add that.

------
heymartinadams
Hi Steven, great idea, just signed up (I’m one of those too busy to read, so
no excuse now).

Feel free to include my published book as well; it’s copyrighted in the
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0.
[https://www.unitism.com/](https://www.unitism.com/)

~~~
steven_pack
Hey there... so I've been considering user uploaded content. I think it could
be a great alternative medium for self-publishing. Needs a bit more work, but
I'll post back here if I release that.

------
lawlorino
This looks pretty cool, congratulations! I was wondering how you set up your
email server to get around the automatic filtering a lot of email providers
use on the user end. For example, I think Gmail automatically filters anything
from a known AWS IP address.

~~~
steven_pack
It just uses the SendGrid API, I don't run the email server. They have a 100
emails per day on the free plan and while it goes to Updates or Promotions on
Gmail, it doesn't get spammed (at least so far).

If it becomes popular, I'd have to upgrade the plan and then you start getting
servers with better IP reputations anyway.

------
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.

~~~
steven_pack
Heheh, War and Peace via text message would be commitment!

------
fakeinc
I really like the idea. However, the Chinese quote on this page “千里之行” should
be “千里之行，始于足下。“ with the author as “老子”, otherwise, it's incorrect. Just my
two cents.

------
BlackLotus89
Tried the man who folded himsel, the time machine and some others but got no
hits. I hope my taste is not too bad or that I'm blind...

~~~
steven_pack
It has to be public domain (and on Project Gutenberg), which typically means
real old. The first book you mentioned is from 1974, so would still be in
copyright.

------
Insanity
Kudos on the idea but I don't really see this being useful. Reading one page
at a time, you'd just end up losing all context.

~~~
steven_pack
I've heard that, but I don't find it to be true. For me at least, one page per
day keeps me connected.

~~~
Insanity
Fair enough :) I'm an avid reader and love to just sit down, pick up a book
(kindle actually the past few years) and read for some time.

------
miguelrochefort
\- I couldn't find a way to get a list of short non-fiction books sorted by
popularity.

\- After entering my email address, I get a 500 error.

~~~
steven_pack
I exhausted the free tier on the email service, which unfortunately killed the
sign up page. Works now if you want to go again.

------
hwestiii
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.

~~~
steven_pack
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.

------
Raphmedia
This is pretty nice, I'll without a doubt be using it. With the way gmail
threads the mails it works great too.

~~~
steven_pack
Oh thanks man! Let me know any feedback!

------
osrec
Interesting idea. Btw, the look and feel of the landing page is similar to
stripe's. Did you model it on that?

~~~
steven_pack
No, but it's a template: [https://www.creative-tim.com/product/vue-argon-
design-system](https://www.creative-tim.com/product/vue-argon-design-system)

Shout out to the designer of that. The had a Vue version with components and
it was super easy to modify. Templates have come a long way.

------
zackproser
This is awesome, Steven! Well done.

~~~
steven_pack
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.

------
pgt
No call-to-action above the fold? Struggling to give you my email address.

~~~
steven_pack
Thanks, I only want your email address when you've chosen a book. But yes,
you're not guided to that well enough. The UI today is very much a template
with some content replaced rather than being designed from the ground up to
optimize for the sign up flow. Lots of opportunity to improve that.

~~~
pgt
Take my email so you can email me a list of books to choose from later. I look
at so many new products and libraries every day that I had already forgotten
the name of your site.

Since I get most of my reading done on the throne (currently re-reading The
Art of Profit by ), I really like the idea of a bite-sized reading app,
especially for the non-fiction business books I mainly read.

------
_threads
Daaamn that’s something I wanted to do for a very long time !

~~~
steven_pack
Oh cool! What was your motivation? I mention the origin story in a comment up
higher.

------
kevintb
Love the idea, but maybe have an optional # of pages?

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nimvlaj30
Website does not work with JS enabled.

------
nikalras1
Read 15 pages already. Great job!

~~~
steven_pack
Ha! That's another vote for the "send me 5 pages" or "send me 10 pages" link
in the emails.

------
ngunity
This is great I like it

~~~
steven_pack
Thank you good sir.

