The new reading stack | Hacker News Reader

The new reading stack

macwright.com

196 pointsTomte71 comments

Just open a text file and write down the books you've read and want to read. All this complication gains for you essentially nothing.

I find some level of trusted recommendations valuable and also love talking about books with friends.

Just because you only care about a small sliver of the product doesn't mean that others feel the same

Avid book readers might make a similar statement about writing code :-)

To be more clear, when a database (with multiple fields, and better workflows) is clearly the right tool, why would you try to implement it one ad-hoc in a simplistic text file/editor!?

And if someone says Emacs+orgmode, that’s basically a nice framework for implementing applications backed by structured data stored in our format :-)

If someone wants to go the plain-old-text-files route for books, I'd stan for GNU Recutils over org-mode.

This is the kind of thing recutils is specifically designed for, where org-mode is merely capable of it by virtue of its kitchen-sink nature.

IMHO recutils should be the first choice if you find yourself wanting both a database and a text file simultaneously.

Unfortunately, you really can’t tell in advance what fields you need. All these precious specialized tools are frustrating.

Plain (-ish) text is flexible and searchable.

But how will all your friends know? /s

I’d trade all of Facebook and Instagram for a single decent lit social network /no-s

What would ‘decent’ mean?

Or just add them to your wishlist on amazon

I've found the Amazon app to load very slowly when the LTE connection isn't great, which is often the case in bookstores, at least where I live.

I agree with the grandparents comment. I just use a list in Apple Notes.

Specifically in the mostly-but-not-exclusively tech world, Leanpub (Leanpub.com) is very close to a bandcamp for books. Authors get most of the sales revenue, and are free to publish what they want including in-progress works. I’ve got a few books there, the readership is smaller than with my mainstream-published titles but as this article shows, that’s because readers don’t yet know about these places.

Bandcamp is 15%, Leanpub is 20%, right? (For sales alone, leanpub also seems to be a lot about the publication process, i.e. how to get the book made, not just selling a finished PDF/epub)

Another interesting shop I've discovered for me within the last year is itch.io. It's mostly for games, but I found out that this includes more and more tabletop role-playing games as e-books. The site is responsive, the individual "store fronts" often have unique customizations, and payment/downloads works reliably. And the RPG PDF market is similarly dominated by a single entity (drivethrurpg), so getting away from that feels good, too.

They also feature an interesting revenue sharing option, where you're deducated the payment processor fees (stripe,paypal) directly, but after that the amount you pay to itch.io is totally customizable (and even their default is just 10%).

There's also a culture of "pay what you want" publications and people paying more than what's asked for. This is partly due to publications often being smaller and more frequent, instead of big honking monographs. As opposed to the programming/entrepreneur market, where e-books often seems ridiculously overpriced for what you get ("here's slightly value-added rephrasing of the react tutorial, that's $49, please").

Gumroad offers better returns compared to Leanpub and author payouts are much faster, but I still put my books on Leanpub as well. Two main reasons:

1) Leanpub is more well known for ebooks, their UI is better and 45-day return policy is great for readers

2) Leanpub has weekly/monthly newsletters that also offers books at a discounted rate. That gives me decent sales. And I think their SEO optimization is better than Gumroad.

It should be noted that the main reason for itch's success as a home for tabletop RPG books is that the main competitor in the field, DriveThruRPG/RPGNow, is a pile of hot garbage with a UI that was bad ten years ago and hasn't changed.

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 books at a time usually mixed between fiction and nonfiction.

Readwise also has an excellent integration with Roam Research that has utterly transformed my whole way of working with books. I can’t emphasize it enough without sounding manic.

Everything I highlight in Kindle now gets automatically imported into my Roam graph. The quotes go into the page for each book (autocreated) under timestamped sections that also show up in my daily notes page. All my highlights from the past were imported in bulk.

It is now trivial and pleasant for me, at any time while I’m thinking and journaling in Roam, to pull in a quote reference from any of my Kindle books, just with a nice inline search box.

I’m getting into writing and researching in a much more serious way and this workflow is a big part of why. I love it so much.

A game-changer for me recently has been that you can read on Kindle on the iPad in split-screen with Notes, highlight something on Kindle and drag it into Notes.

These are great tools but are there any nice iOS apps to quickly take a photo of a physical book page , and with OCR produce a text page that I can highlight, and send highlights to Roam (which I use a lot).

Some books are much better experienced in physical form, e.g I would hate to read Rian Hughes’ XX on a kindle :)

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

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

Oh, that looks quite interesting. I’m going to have to check it out.

The Airr podcast app works with Readwise as well

This is probably different for different cities & cultures but where I live there are a lot of small book shops. Both for second hand and newly printed. People also tend to leave a lot of books on the street to take. I recently found Dark City, Silence of the Lambs and The Dean(?) in his domain on the street. All in good condition and I enjoyed eating them.

I really don't understand why everything needs to be tracked.

Reading for me is a journey for its sake, the destination is not interesting.

The only mention of personal tracking is in the introductory section to the article.

The first two apps linked are for... purchasing books from local bookstores.

The third is for critic book reviews.

The fourth is for discussing books socially.

The fifth is for reading books via the Internet Archive.

But how exactly did you eat them?

Boiled in milk with a side of raw jellybeans ;-)

Probably the best way to eat a good steak.

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.

While this is obvious to many I’ve always struggled to get myself to read those early works.

Now obvious question is what is the best book to read on the topic of reading books?

I think one of the best is “How to read a book” by Mortimer Adler. It is about all books and cannot recommend it highly enough. It is in public domain already unless I’m mistaken so here is a link [1].

[1] https://delong.typepad.com/files/adler-read.pdf

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 needed to write my own simple ARQ implementation to feel like I could fully appreciate and have a "feel" for what two machines are "actually doing" when they're sending packets back and forth.

I had the same obsessive desire to completely understand from the bottom-up how database engines were implemented because I just didn't feel comfortable with just the knowledge that "selects on tables with indexes on the field being queried are 'fast'". I just _had_ to know what was making them fast. Funny thing, when I found out that databases and database indexes were just disk-persisted/in-memory self balancing search trees or hash tables, I thought to myself, "that's it? why didn't anyone just tell me that instead of just repeating "queries are fast/optimized by the db"?"

I don't know if my brain just works differently because it seems most people I've worked with seem to get frustrated/annoyed with these details and not even have any desire to learn a system in-depth like this. They seem to only want to reason about a system at its highest level of abstraction, whereas to me, with the database example, once I learned that B+ trees were one of the primary data structures that backed database systems, I felt like the system as a whole just became that much more transparent and easy to reason about because now I could leverage all of my intuitions+past experiences relating to performance of operations on tree structures, having an intuition of perf implications of using linked data structures, reasoning about issues like paging chunks of data in and out of disk, etc.

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.

That's a really good point. I've also done what you mentioned in your first paragraph but stopped digging deeper once I hit the "now I have to understand physics to actually understand why electricity behaves the way it does in order to flow through transistors/logic gates" barrier. My reasoning at the time was a combination of asking myself how much time I actually had to dive into that as well, plus how much of a potential return I thought I could get from having resolved those questions.

Both this and your above comment might just be the most uninvited and self-absorbed accounts of internal reasoning I've encountered in a neutral space online in a long time. Maybe you can do a deep dive on your presentation and determine the abstract reason why you think colleagues aren't interested in the same things as you (hint: it's not the topics).

Seems like I struck a nerve here... I didn't realize I'm not allowed to use HN to start discussions with other readers about topics they bring up :)

I like to post about these kinds of thoughts on HN because I feel the crowd is the type to offer useful insights I don't find elsewhere on the internet or even IRL. Do I have a tendency to ramble? Sure, look at my post history...

If you have any insights about what I mentioned (a thing I've been curious about for a long time), I'm all ears - but I don't see how being salty is contributing.

I can understand why my comment reads "salty" - I apologize for that. In all honesty, based on what you said, I actually think you and I have much in common (having undergone similar technical exercises for the pure sake of understanding). My issue was/is your delivery (albeit typed and perhaps it is just the medium, again, apologies) - you didn't start a discussion, even when the parent responded you hardly even acknowledged what they said before you simply doubled down on speaking "at" them/us about yourself and your interests in affirmative statements (that in all honesty read like you're "one-upping" everyone for some reason) that leave open very little room for an equitable response. I guess, what I'm trying to say, is that I think human nature is such that people want to feel comfortable with another human before diving into a technical topic with them (even on HN!). That rapport is subtle and relies on so much more than just factual knowledge or a common project; it needs genuine, mutual interest in other people, and if I could make any suggestion (advice I try to take myself) it would be a more polished delivery. Or, as my mom always told me, "it's not enough to be right all the time - you have to be kind, too."

Another option in the UK is https://www.hive.co.uk/ which is an online bookstore (physical, ebook).

Every sale is linked to a physical bookstore of your choice, which gets between 10% and 25% for physical books (dependent on delivery/collection), and 8% on ebooks even though the nominated store has no work to do for it.

What I don’t like about hive is that as far as I can find out it’s somewhat vague about how much and how the bookshops get (and I consider “choosing after” to be a somewhat darkish pattern)

That said, a combination of hive, bookshop.org, worldofbooks and being prepared to pay a couple of pounds more has meant I almost entirely avoid amazon for books now.

(not sure how ethical worldofbooks is, they sell through amazon which is how I found them, but _not Amazon_ is the point)

You're right in that it isn't absolutely specific, just giving general ranges.

What they say is: Whether you order books, films, music, games, or anything else, your chosen bookshop will receive commission. They will receive a minimum of 10% on the net value of all book orders, rising to 25% when you select store collection. We pay 8% on eBooks and 3% on entertainment products. Bookshops receive their commission monthly.

when buying an ebook, it sounds like hive is donating 8% to a bookstore?

I didn’t know that Tom left observablehq.

https://macwright.com/work/

I used observablehq (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275849) for a nonprofit project in 2019. It was a enjoyable experience.

Glad to see he has some downtime and wish him the best.

I like the idea of reading books; well, I read a lot[1] and my plan this year is to reduce the quantity and focus on quality. As suggested by some comments on this thread, I've also, quite a while back, moved more and more towards a plain-text life. Nonetheless, I let GoodReads[2] track the books I read on the Kindle.

Here is something I found on the Internet and have made my ways of reading books more thoroughly and deeply instead of trying to read more.

Write out about the book you read;

- Describe the book in few sentences.

- Your impressions of the book.

- Who else or what type of person should read this book

- Did the book changed you in any way. How?

- Are there any quotes from the book that you want to remember, repeat, or follow.

- Some Summary, snippets, and notes.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2020/books-of-2020/

2. https://www.goodreads.com

Impressive. How do you take care of your eyes? Reading 100 books/year means that on avg. you read 1 book in 3 days. I imagine that must put a lot of stress on your eyes?

I read most mostly in the open (Parks, Greens), while riding/flying, etc.

> the options we have to buy books and track our reading are terrible

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that reading must be tracked, outside maybe some textbooks/papers if you're going through a study plan.

Don’t miss the word “option”, which you replaced with “need” so you could come down hard on it. Many of us want to track it. (No more discussion on this point is needed imo)

If you want to know why people like to track it, just ask.

I think we need to rethink the whole book publishing and consuming industry in the framework of attention economy.

See the “Advice for the Transition” section:

https://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440

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/).

A while back while learning a foreign language I stumbled across https://www.wattpad.com/

Note that I've only used it for reading and not for tracking my reads, finding recommendations, etc.

'Amazon embodies the idea that companies need to “maximize shareholder value” - a total falsehood invented in the 1970s by Milton Friedman'

One can agree or disagree with this statement of values, but it is not a dishonest "falsehood".

The entire statement is in fact a falsehood, as Amazon does not embody that idea, regardless of its veracity. Amazon has never paid a dividend, and is guided as much or more by the pursuit of growth (and also "customer value" although unevenly) that simply maximising shareholder value.

You don't need to pay dividends to maximize shareholder value. As you correctly point out Amazon prioritizes growth over dividends, but also with the goal of maximizing shareholder value (business is bigger/more stable/etc. -> value of shares goes up).

There are two hyperlinks in that sentence that I hoped would avoid ambiguity by citing sources, but I'll make it more explicit in the copy.

Of course if you want to attract investors you have to take their interests into account, thats just self preservation. but many people seem to believe that companies are legally required to maximize returns which is false.

Maybe they problem is the word "need". How do you interpret the word in this context? I read it as "are legally required to", which is a thing that can be true or false.

Correct, and it indeed not a legal requirement in the U.S.

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.

I have moved over too. While I still log my reads on Goodreads as well, I've really stopped interacting there and mostly enjoy the StoryGraph experience so much more. If it wasn't for a few people who I like to see what they're reading as we have similar tastes, I would never look back.

Take a look at bookshop.org, one of the sites called out by this article. I was surprised by the level of bias and ideological possession on display in their curation choices, and without a shred of self-awareness that I could find.

They seem obsessed with pushing e.g. Critical Race Theory on the front page, a religion about on par with Scientology.

How embarrassing for a site called “Bookshop”, which (ostensibly) claims to cater to a wide variety of tastes. Such an obsession with disreputable religious material will probably only serve to alienate most potential customers.

The Library Extension is a browser plugin which helps you find books in your local library:

https://www.libraryextension.com/

The StoryGraph is another Goodreads alternative:

https://readervoracious.com/storygraph-a-better-goodreads-fi...

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.

Goodreads+libgen+kindle. Liquidtext on iPad for material you want to thoroughly annotate. Amazon gets nothing and you get everything.

I still miss Readmill http://readmill.com

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.

clippings.io beautiful editor for your Kindle highlights and allows you to export them to Dropbox, OneNote, Evernote and a bunch more integrations.

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 extent, but doesn't seem to include most vendors in my country (Germany).

Also there were other reasons why I didn't want to use LibraryThing anymore, which I have forgotten. I just remember that I didn't want to use it anymore some years ago.

I recently started using https://www.thestorygraph.com/ — it's for keeping track of your own reading, and they're promoting their own reco algorithm. Also, there's a paid plan with extra features.

It's early days, but it's neat and clean and it feels the opposite of Goodreads' everything-for-everyone-at-once-all-the-time approach.

From what I've seen of their recommendation algorithm, it's actually better that Goodreads's as well. The only issue being it seems to aggregate what you put in as your mood and preferences as well as what you've read, whereas on Goodreads you can filter by 'shelf' (which is usually horrible, but a feature I'd love to have on StoryGraph)

I still buy my eBooks from Amazon. I currently live in Germany, but use Amazon’s India store to buy eBooks because the same ebook in Amazon.de costs twice. All you need is a transferwise card (or something similar) and you can pay in rupees.

P.S: I understand that the parent’s main concern with Amazon isn’t the price.

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 or thalia.de. Often they have a copy from a cheaper publisher (at least for English ebooks) and whether it costs 4.5 or 5 euros doesn’t make much of a difference. I am just glad I am not giving the money to Amazon. The last time I bought an ebook from Amazon is more than 10 years ago.

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.

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)

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