Show HN: Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book
Being locked down with plenty of time in my hands, I clearly noticed a problem that I faced and also felt passionate about tackling.
- Excessive screen time in our day-to-day - Diminishing attention spans
It was consistently tough to properly read quality longform content online. From screen related tiredness to having ads and notifications pop up and demand a share of my attention, my focus was compromised.
Long story short, I wanted to read longform content that lives online (and there is a ton of high quality out there), in an inherent offline medium, paper :p
Fast forward 5 months, we just published the beta of (https://myscreenbreak.com) We are redesigning webpages from scratch and making them print optimised.
While we aim to be able to deliver physical books by q1 2021, our current print-at-home version for single articles and collections can give you an indicative idea of how v1 product will look like.
If there are any other paper/book loving weirdos out there, happy to hear and learn from them :)
121 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/trufelman/status/1312827037472763907
Perhaps it could be broken up into smaller chunks, not to exceed XX number of pages, so that I could tackle my reading list as a series of volumes. Maybe you could even add a feature to have those volumes automatically generated and disseminated at some kind of regular, periodic interval.
The way we have thought about it is that you can add all the “to print” content in the 'my articles' page, then create collections (i.e books to be printed) and add the articles into them accordingly.
We have thought about integrating with bookmark managers, but a core issue with that, is that we do not have access to paid content users have/do not what to provide access to content to users that shouldn’t have.
Our implementation is by snapshot-ing via our extension a user’s tab, hence providing content that we know for a fact a user has access.
If you share the material with someone else, you're into infringement territory in most of the 1st World and substantially beyond, as far as I'm aware. If I tried to do this as a service, I'd probably get sued to the stone age, and I'd deserve it. But running it at home? Who's gonna know, and who's going to have a legal leg to stand on if they care?
Also we all used to joke about various parents doing this exact thing, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone get into trouble for it.
Isn't that what this post is about? They are planning to print a physical book made up of arbitrary text chosen by the user and then ship that book to the user.
So my conclusion is bunk, although the decision tree I loosely mapped out might still be useful for others so I'll leave it as is.
Can you share a citation for this? I'm a (former) lawyer and have never heard of a blanket protection for time and location shifting. It might be allowed for certain types of copyrighted content, or if done by the end-user. But I don't think there's a blanket allowance for all copyrighted materials, especially when a third party is involved.
To be sure, it's a pretty loose contract and you could probably get away with printing a small amount of copyrighted material. But it at least shifts the liability onto the customer so the retailer can always point to the agreement and say "hey, they said they weren't printing anything illegally; that's on them for lying."
Similar goal.
The site does look interesting though.
Joking aside, this does sound like something I'd actually use and the formatting on the resulting document is very pretty. And just to let you know, your "Buy us a coffee" link gets jumbled at lower screen widths.
A suggestion: maybe some auto tagging and ordering the articles by topic or source? It might not be that technically expensive to do + adds to the organization value? I hate when I browse my to-read list and I just find a sea of productivity or tech articles when I really just don't want to see those that day.
Interested about the serendipity idea, we have thought about it more from the point of view that user builds the book chapters. Would randomly selecting articles for a subscription type service (say deliver a book every month) make sense to you?
However, I question whether this will work consistently, since in my experience it takes a lot of developer attention to cover all the design anti-patterns out there.
It's a classic problem of course but I don't see why this is better than using something like Pocket, which has enough traction to get parsing right most of the time even if its print style might be less nice. It also has good integration with my e-reader.
For the intended physical-book version, I think you're setting yourself up for serious copyright problems. You're going to republish the Wall Street Journal because one of its readers asked you to?
Anyway it looks like a fun project and I wish you luck with it!
Regarding the video I'd like to point out:
1. It makes the service look really slow! Probably not what you want!
2. The video ends with an ad for the video hosting company, which I found confusing at first.
[edit: less speculation]
From a technical standpoint, you are correct that this is a massive challenge. However for us to eventually get something print production ready, we needed to build our own extraction software that preserves stylesheet, images, sequence etc. We will definitely face a lot of failures initially, but hopefully will be able to build interesting machine learning models that will make the service much better over time. We have already built tools that will enable us to fix most of the possible issues pre-production.
About the legal concerns, we will be printing content, we know 100% user already has access to, for its personal use. Won't be any different than creating a pdf file (eg from file print) and going to a print shop with a usb to print it out (or stitch).
Regarding the video, it is slow, but this is the best we have made it to snapshot html, send it to our servers and extract the relevant info. We aim to make it faster, but that's the reality and didn't want to show anything fake. Rendering could take even longer depending on size etc, obv tons of room for optimisation.
Shot 1: an article Shot 2: "30 seconds later..." Shot 3: the finished product
That way I can see the product in action, know how long it actually takes to work, and not waste 30s of my life unnecessarily
I use Safari as my primary browser and am not interested at switching browsers at this time. However I am interested in trying My Screen Break!
Generally the main reason going through via extension is that we can then provide the service to paid content users have access to and we don't. There are other technical considerations too.
And if you took it a step further I would _love_ some form of API access (even with reasonable usage limits and legal restrictions to personal use only).
(I wouldn't have time to read it otherwise.)
If you use Pocket (built into Firefox and low-friction plugin for other browsers incl mobile) the Kobo e-reader is awesome. You can import Pocket articles to read offline and they are essentially displayed as epub e-books. They're also displayed in print-optimized format (no ads). E-ink ends up being a great way to read these long-form articles.
What do you mean? Is 'this' referring to Pocket or your service?
Also:
.scribble-4 { right: -2%; }
causes horizontal scroll on chrome/chromium/firefox.
Pity that it's already three versions behind, of course.
Find any way around that? Mailchimp newsletter html versions are a big one.
It all started in a similar way, around 2010, with a lot of free time in my hands and with the help of some fantastic friends who became co-founders. At the beginning it was more of an artsy thing (look at our manifesto [2]), definitely fueled by a love for books and a desire to slow down the merciless wheel of tech. The commercial vein only attracted us later. Fast forward to 2014 and we had a working product, we passed through the Startup zoo (2 incubators and various shows) and managed to raise about $500k.
But sales never took off. As we tried to expand the scope of the product by integrating WhatsApp and other messaging systems, it finally dawned to us just how small the market was. By the time we decided to pivot to a more visual product (ie: Photo-books), money were running out. When we finally closed the company in 2016, I think we had produced a few thousand books, but <10k.
It was a fun ride. Wish you the best of luck!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160131132208/https://memeoirs.... [2] https://www.jamez.it/project/memeoirs/
I think the closest real world (as in wide scale commercialization or deployment) of your original idea was Facebook’s automated video they made for each account (assuming they had enough content) playing back your history via photos, friends, events etc. Cant remember the name of that video feature just now.
There’s always a core idea in each product that has some practical value somewhere.
As for real world products: Shutterfly/Snapfish are still looking healthy, and Google Photos is pushing hard their print store, which is where we were eventually heading to. And in the category "real world products that never were" - WhatsApp reached us shortly after the acquisition by FB. They were interested in partnering up with us, until all of a sudden they weren't anymore.
The core idea, as you say, is always there. For us it was the importance of Memory, which will keep on cropping up on many products to come. You just got to be riding the right one. :-)
Exploring a pocket to pdf to kindle pipeline is on my todolist using either https://www.printfriendly.com or https://www.api2pdf.com
If anyone has done something similar would love to some feedback.
I've been beta testing it for a while and love reading longer articles/newsletters right on my e-reader
Soon I will get a new e-reader, perhaps I could refresh and publish it on GitHub :)
There's something to say about a physical thing demanding less mental mobilization in some scenarios where going tangible makes better sense from an experience the world and get things done perspective.
Deciding what to focus on yourself instead of the app showing you random screens which the developer thinks are currently important. The tool being out of the way and only the important things in-front of you. Where only you yourself decide what is important.
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that there's a precision of attention in digital UIs just to click the right button and just all the aiming involved though simple actually has a pretty tight tolerance with fine motor skills and large room for error compared to a quick and dirty gross motion you can get away with for things in the real world. Hopefully that makes sense.
I actually do that with scientific papers: if I have a long trip planned, I'll go to my university's reproduction office, and have them make a book with them. Well worth the price!
I imagine copyright is a problem?
Just because it's not something you'd like to use, there's no reason to be this dismissive.
I'm no longer working on it (the service is shut down), and have since transitioned to a new project, but I would be happy to chat. Do you have an email I can reach out to? If not comfortable sharing, feel free to reach out to me on twitter.com/outofthebot