

Show HN: Glose, a next-generation social reading platform for ebooks - julien_c
https://glose.com

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rhythmvs
Happy to see a successor for the acquihired/killed Readmill. Readmill offered
a ton of free (public domain) books, right after signup, allowing new users to
try the app’s full reading/highlighting/sharing/commenting experience, before
having them purchase books just to get a grasp of, say, the basic typographic
look and feel. It drew me in, I bought some titles, and own the epub files
still, even after Readmill went to the deadpool. What’s Glose’s offering as
regards long-term preservation of my electronic library investment?

~~~
julien_c
Thanks for the feedback and great question. We're in the process of
formalizing a statement in our Terms of service that will require us, should
we go out of business one day, to let users download their purchased books to
read off Glose.

Also, fully agree with your feedback on public domain books! We have a pretty
good selection of those and are working to expand it. We loved Readmill as
well, and we want to build something even better and sustainable.

Would love to hear more of your thoughts about this.

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devindotcom
What's "next-generation" about it, if the present generation Kindle app and
e-reader devices have annotation and sharing features, along with things like
GoodReads integration?

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julien_c
Hi HN,

I'm a cofounder and CTO at Glose. Please let us know if any questions or
feedback! We're very excited to be launching and trying to reinvent the way we
read books :)

Download link for iOS:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glose/id896681871?ls=1&mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glose/id896681871?ls=1&mt=8)

~~~
leostatic
I have been thinking about this space for quite some time now and maybe if I
fast forwarded that process and reached a final conclusion, Glose would pretty
much be it.

Back when hard copies were pretty much the only copies available for a book,
it was pretty easy for me to

    
    
      a) read a book
      b) make notes in the side lines
      c) markup text that I liked and
      d) easily skim through the book later thanks to the notes. 
    

I lost b,c & d when I moved to reading on my Nexus only about 2 years ago. I
find that I have lower retention rate, find it difficult to find out what all
I've read in quick glance and basically try and connect my readings.
Previously, I'd just take a look at the stack of books on my table.

I tried finding some reader apps that would allow me to bring back my older
pattern of reading. Sadly, no app did it properly. I tried Mantano which
allowed me to make notes but it would forget them if I moved the file in
storage. Also, the notes were available only inside the Mantano android app.

Right now, an acceptable world for me would be wherein I can take notes
(including highlighting quotes) and once I am done with the book I have a page
/leostatic/zero-to-one where all of my notes with the associated page number
is presented. Allow me to click on a note and jump to the page, put in social
features and I'm satisfied. For now at least.

One interesting feature while keeping in mind the above para would be
something along the lines of: I visit julien_c/zero-to-one and I get an option
to read the book with your notes visible. So now it is almost like reading
your hard copy with notes scribbled in.

EDIT: One major issue that I find in glose from my perspective is the overdose
of social. Don't get me wrong, I _want_ social but I don't want it _all_ the
time. I know I can click on the icon in top right in the web app and select
"Only me" but that isn't what I am talking about. Each time I want to
highlight something, it throws the annotate field. I don't have data to back
this up but intuition tells me number of highlights only will be much greater
than highlight + annotate. Let me just highlight and continue reading.

~~~
julien_c
Thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping you'll like Glose!

We're definitely intending to have pages where you can filter your highlights
and annotations on one specific book.

