Show HN: Pageturner – a community for building a reading habit | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pageturner – a community for building a reading habit

joinpageturner.com

82 pointsbcye40 comments

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.

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 ;))

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.

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.

This is basically a chicken and egg problem :/

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.

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!

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.

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.

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)

Thank you for the feedback :)

> 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

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 fc68df5cafe0959d71c7ddced81319c8bd18ad55.8929fc3232571246e5ea.js?__WB_REVISION__=30b9439112758a5b55648404f18dbb03:1 at fc68df5cafe0959d71c7ddced81319c8bd18ad55.8929fc3232571246e5ea.js?__WB_REVISION__=30b9439112758a5b55648404f18dbb03:1 at XMLHttpRequest.<anonymous> (fc68df5cafe0959d71c7ddced81319c8bd18ad55.8929fc3232571246e5ea.js?__WB_REVISION__=30b9439112758a5b55648404f18dbb03:1) at XMLHttpRequest.r (_app-dc4e7bee69cae42377f5.js?__WB_REVISION__=0be3e881fe087714d355d6124086839d:1) ```

Hi thank you for sending it. I'm getting those in Sentry and still trying to figure out what's causing them.

Fixed.

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?

Can you use the live chat on the website?

Ah cool, what is the book discovery extension? I'd like to check that out.

Looks really cool. Looks like I'm now hitting an unexpected error when trying to load the page

let me look into that :/

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.

Just sent out an email. It works again.

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.

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.

Maker of Makerlog here. I'm so glad to hear this!

Congrats on the launch!

Thanks Sergio :)

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.

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?

> 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)

Yes.

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.

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!).

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.

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.

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)

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.

I'm a sucker for any site for book lovers (Good Reads, Open Library, Gutenberg Project, some of my faves). Looks early but cool stuff!

Yes, still some bugs to fix :)

Looking forward to seeing you on there if you decide to give it a try :)

Aren't these called "book clubs"

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.

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