Show HN: 73,530 free book summaries in 40 languages (with paid audio)
sobrief.com
sobrief.com
Now whether they're interesting or not is another question.....
The quotes at the start of each section were some of the worst offenders. I really have no idea what the first quote was referring to. It didn't relate to any of the themes of the book, or any of the following summary points, and I don't remember reading that line at all; it just seemed totally out of place.
I'm not really sure what I would use this service for. When I'm interested in a book that I haven't read it's generally the overarching concepts and takeaways that I want to know, not a spotty outline of the different sections of text. Perhaps students who want to skim through some assigned reading would find this useful. I'm also not that interested in Blinkist so I might not be the target audience here.
From what I found based in some titles that I have read in the past and in comparison with Blinkist:
- The summaries here feels that has more "meat in the bone" in terms of bring complex ideas and have more bullet points
- Maybe it's about the prompting, but the language used you can definitely know that is generated by an LLM
- Having the direct quotes from the book after an initial definition of the theme of a chapter it's good
- The whole experience with the LLM kicking in on the fly, makes the whole experience quite bad; maybe you should consider have that pre-stored in some place
Honestly, I think your product it's 85% of theirs (and this is not something bad).
The pricing USD 79 for a lifetime it's OK, but without giving some kind of access or even make some library available it's quite hard to see someone paying for a library that you do not know the books that is in there.
From the legal perspective, I think you might be in some hot water since some publishers can dispute the fair use due to the fact that you're monetizing part of their content.
On-the-fly/cache: Yeah, I agree. We're only four months old—the number of on-the-fly summaries will go down significantly over time.
85%: What could make it 100%?
Pricing: I think that's fair. But considering Blinkist charges for $100+ for yearly, the $80 lifetime deal isn't that bad.
Legal: We actually drive a decent amount of traffic to Amazon, Audible, and Kindle. We're hoping to partner with the publishers and authors in the future whether in the form of revenue sharing or licsening.
How are you doing it?
EDIT: just added a help article saying that we use ai
Meaning you “generated” 73k “summaries” of which you are wholly unable to verify the content of because it would require you to have read the books and listened to/read the “summaries”.
What is with sloppybros and thinking quantity is more desirable than quality?
What motivated you to “remove” this fact from your website? Legitimate criticism?
No, we generate summaries on the fly, too. Why would you generate all the summaries in advance when you can summarize real-time when a user clicks on it?
> What is with sloppybros and thinking quantity is more desirable than quality?
Have you read any of our summaries? Go ahead and read a summary of a book you've actually read and let me know what it's lacking. IMO, our summaries are way more thorough than human-written counterparts. And the structure is consistent across the entire catalog. In other words, we offer both quality and quantity.
> What motivated you to “remove” this fact from your website? Legitimate criticism?
No, just a matter of branding. We thought "AI" might add a cool factor, but everyone's AI nowadays, so we're just differentiating. Also, we didn't care to buy the ".ai" domain either. Most people already know it's AI-powered without us letting them know.
Well the most obvious reason is that the summary page would load faster. I clicked on a book summary and it took much longer to render than even a bloated web app usually takes.
73k summaries isn't that many. If your site gets any traction most of those summaries will be hit repeatedly and will have to generate anyway. Creating the summaries in advance would also allow you to test and verify the output, if you're interested in that.
As a small company, we currently need to sacrifice the first reader's experience for the sake of spreading out the costs over time. But every subsequent read is cached!
Yikes, so the summaries change with each viewing?
Information that changes each time you read it is by definition “unreliable”.
> Go ahead and read a summary of a book you've actually read and let me know what it's lacking.
Work for a sloppyjoe? And for free?!
Come on. I think you have clearly grown a little too accustom to exploiting other peoples’ work.
Hey, just have your AIs check them all. Right?
This message modal appeared when I tried to select a book. I'm sure you know that's not the user experience anyone wants.
The invisible hand that somehow forces authors to bloat their 3 paragraph gist into 200 pages kills the whole industry. I don't care if a book is only 15 pages long and costs $10, just leave the filler out or separate it with a blank page, then could come the 200 page long bs.
I used to call that as a "Talebnization" of business/management writing that everyone uses more or less the same format to convey a idea: - Some random quote to support the point
- 1 paragraph with the point
- 1 or 2 anecdotes or researched case about the point
- Some broad cherry-picked statistic to bring some rigor
- A success case due to the point
- Closing thoughts without any counterpoint, critique, or presence of any downside in the main point of the chapter.
Do that for 20 chapters and you have a book.