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Comment by BenoitEssiambre | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a common criticism. I have re-written the description dozens of times and I can't seem to get it right.

Many people tell me it's too long at there is too much text. Others tell me they don't see what it's for.

Even though I believe strongly in the value Bookvoid provides, the fact that I have difficulty articulating concisely this value is definitely a weakness.

One problem is that it was inspired by machine learning/ Bayesian probabilistic principles of how information should be organised and mathematical principles don't make good tag lines.

Maybe the whole thing is just too wonky. I don't know.

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Seems interesting, but I really think you should start with a landing page that gives folks an idea of what the product is, and a couple sample use cases. Then a big button to "Start Using Bookvoid", and then drop them into your sample.

As has also been suggested, easy to see/use links to incorporate Evernote and other sharing platforms would also be a good idea.

FWIW...

This. Give the folks just a simple intro page (ie. "hey, this is what bookvoid is for!") and THEN show 'em the sample.

An observation: your 'feature box' shows two things that I can do (create & read; add notes & highlights), and one mildly techie thing (tablet optimized).

Concentrate on what people can do on your site and what problem it solves. To be blunt, I don't care if it's been optimized for tablets, phones, or Big Chief notebooks. I want to know why I should spend any more time on your site.

Also: the navbar and title take up a lot of vertical space. Use that space to show and tell me how you can make my life better.

What problem or pain does it solve? How does it improve the quality of my life? Why should I care?

Exactly, take the problem / solution, reduce it to 5 words tops and it'll make a standard short intro that people think is cool these days.

From what I can gather it's about a platform to make readable content more accessible, more dynamic, in an attempt to provide a nice reading/learning experience much like wikipedia clicking for half an hour, but on more serious topics and in a friendlier fashion that allows you to easily go back to the article/topic you were reading one thought step before.

That's still too long, but summarizing the idea made it way more appealing to me so it might be a direction.

Thanks. This helps :-)

This is another common question I get. Let me try to answer it again (I need the practice).

For readers:

-Optimizes learning of complex concepts.

-Books are like web pages with links that open inline. This prevents readers from having to manage dozens of browser tabs. This often happens to me, for example, when browsing wikipedia.

-Makes books available on more devices than native apps.

-Features such as word highlighting, starring etc.

For content creators

-books can easily include inline sections from other bookvoid books. The author's job becomes part authoring part curation and it saves him or her from writing suff that has already been written.

It is all based on optimal principles of hierarchical information organisation. In my view, there are very fundament ontological principles, rooted in mathematics and philosophy, that make this kind of hierarchical linking of concepts optimal to human reasoning.

I see it as solving some of the problems that wikis have by providing the enforcement of hierarchy, the inclusion of different levels of details about subjects in a single text and the ability to maintain a chain of trust on material. Anyone can't edit everything like in wikis. If your own books is not popular, you have to have been curated-in by more popular author to gain visibility. You can't simply insert yourself in a popular page like in wikis.

edit: formatting

That was too wordy.

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