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Comment by philomath_mn | Hacker News Reader

I am both skeptical and interested:

- Looks like you turn the knob to set your page

- This, and your book title, appear to be the only input data to the system (no other sensors)

- Does this mean they aim to have a database of the text of every edition of every book, indexed by page?

If they can pull it off I think it could be useful, but I think they will need to compromise on quality if they hit copyright issues.

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They have a database of books but it's limited. This is the Achilles heel that they don't really mention.

Yeah, they're also going to get sued out of existence by publishers if they try this.

https://x.com/markhardware/status/1894829887304933626

Yeah I responded to that the other day about a recipe app that tried something similar. It allowed people to scan the barcode of recipe books they owned to add the contained recipes into the app. They were busted.

Wonder how Readwise is managing what they do -- really hope they don't get shut down.

No idea. But here's an article on the recipe book barcode scanner app (2016): https://www.superbcrew.com/scan-recipes-allows-you-to-turn-b...

I'm not familiar with Readwise but it appears they only store highlights? Publishers probably don't like that but don't care enough to do anything about it, whereas "uploading copies of books to the services to do AI stuff with them" is the subject of many ongoing lawsuits right now, so they'll be very interested if this takes off.

Right, I just don't know where the dividing line would be. What % of a book is acceptable?

If that's the case, what does this metal plate do that my phone can't? It is just a knob that sends a number to my phone? Why can't I just use my phone? This feels like the humane pin again.

Well, it's a bookmark ...I guess. One that can be used to select a book from a list and set a page number. But, yeah. I just don't see the need for it.

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