Show HN: Glose, a next-generation social reading platform for ebooks

Also, fully agree with your feedback on public domain books! We have a pretty good selection of those and are working to expand it. We loved Readmill as well, and we want to build something even better and sustainable.

Would love to hear more of your thoughts about this.

One thing immediately apparent when creating the account is the lack of "search" functionality when asked to select books I already like. Maybe I didn't find it? I tried the "Apple idiom" of pull down to search. The book selection was iffy so I skipped it -- it looks like 10 'recently published' titles instead of stood-the-test-of-time type novels (eg: no Dune, Ender's Game, Neuromancer, Foundation Series for Sci-Fi). Also the "skip" in the top right corner on that page is so super light grey on a white background that I almost didn't see it -- if I am using this app to read the last thing I want to encounter is anything remotely tough to read on my eyes. Especially when goading me into signing up.

Also, when clicking "create account" there wasn't any feedback it was happening (spinners, greying out of the button, etc). My phone is an older generation (4S) with a lifeproof screen protector so it will occasionally hiccup and not register my touches. I kept thumbing thinking it was hiccupping, not realizing it would later create many "Error: Username already taken" dialogs I had to thumb through.

A question I do have is how spoilers are dealt with in annotations. I haven't tried reading a book and using that particular feature yet, but it would be a concern of mine.

I look forward to playing around with it more!

Back when hard copies were pretty much the only copies available for a book, it was pretty easy for me to

  a) read a book
  b) make notes in the side lines
  c) markup text that I liked and
  d) easily skim through the book later thanks to the notes. 

I tried finding some reader apps that would allow me to bring back my older pattern of reading. Sadly, no app did it properly. I tried Mantano which allowed me to make notes but it would forget them if I moved the file in storage. Also, the notes were available only inside the Mantano android app.

Right now, an acceptable world for me would be wherein I can take notes (including highlighting quotes) and once I am done with the book I have a page /leostatic/zero-to-one where all of my notes with the associated page number is presented. Allow me to click on a note and jump to the page, put in social features and I'm satisfied. For now at least.

One interesting feature while keeping in mind the above para would be something along the lines of: I visit julien_c/zero-to-one and I get an option to read the book with your notes visible. So now it is almost like reading your hard copy with notes scribbled in.

EDIT: One major issue that I find in glose from my perspective is the overdose of social. Don't get me wrong, I _want_ social but I don't want it _all_ the time. I know I can click on the icon in top right in the web app and select "Only me" but that isn't what I am talking about. Each time I want to highlight something, it throws the annotate field. I don't have data to back this up but intuition tells me number of highlights only will be much greater than highlight + annotate. Let me just highlight and continue reading.