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Show HN: Octavore, from instapaper to insta-books

3 points by tpwong ↗ HN
I've been accumulating bookmarks for a long time, and often wished that I could save some of that collective wisdom into a more enduring form. With the new Instapaper API, I've finally found a way.

Over the weekend I hacked together Octavore, a mashup of Instapaper and Lulu, a self-publishing website. Now anyone can get their own personalized, dead-tree copy of the Internet's finest! Get a real copy of your favorite articles, stories, and essays for only $12.

Notes: It's built on Rails, so it might be a little bit slow as both the book generation and publishing take a while to complete and block the server while processing. There's no background workers or anything fancy as I only worked with what I knew to get it up quickly.

This is my first publicly launched weekend project, and I'm really excited. Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are all especially welcome, thanks!

http://octavore.com

5 comments

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dustinchilson
I really like the idea. Your landing page could use a little more info though. I don't have enough saved content to try it out at the moment but cool none the less.

I was wondering how you plan to make money off if it (if you do).

tpwong
Yeah, it's all pretty sparse right now. There's a bit more information here: http://octavore.com/about

I make a little off of each book that gets sold, although I don't really expect the website to make much, it's really just a fun side project for me.

rprasad
Let me see if I understand this correctly: you are making print copies of websites without their permission?

Even if you did not take a percentage of the cut, or charge any money, this would be a per se copyright violation. (Instapaper itself rests on shaky fair use grounds, close to but not quite over the edge into copyright infringement). You've jumped into the chasm.

If your service was intended for websites to allow people to make customized print copies, it would be okay, because the copyright owner would be opting into your service. The website would be, explicitly or in effect, providing a copyright license allowing for the service/users to make print copies of their website.

And that's assuming you are in the U.S. If you're in Europe, fair use laws are far less permissive.

tpwong
Octavore allows individuals to create print copies of articles they choose for their personal use. To clarify, the books that are generated are not made available to the public.

For what it's worth, I did hesitate when considering the copyright issues while working on Octavore. In general I believe in respecting copyright laws and IP rights, but in this case I feel the onus is on the user, and decided to err on the side of making something interesting, for now.

In any case, I'll make it clear on the website that I do not condone violating copyright, and provide an email address for publishers to opt out, similar to Instapaper. Thanks for your feedback!