Show HN: Create books on any topic with ChatGPT (books-by-ai.vercel.app)

13 points by timz ↗ HN
This weekend wanted to try out the streaming ChatGPT API.

As test project, created a simple website, which allows you to create whole books by providing just the title (with optional extra instructions).

Given the title of the book, table of contents, chapters and sections with text content are generated.

All books are listed on the home page, sorted into topic categories.

As a bonus, when reading a specific section of a chapter, you can use the chat interface to ask for clarifications, request more content, list relevant topics, etc.

The system does quite well with knowledge based books (history for example) and not so good with literature, where more prompt tweaking is needed.

What books would you create?

# Examples:

The Bible https://the-bible.yo.link

Child Psychology for Parents https://child-psychology-for-parents.yo.link

ChatGPT: A step towards Artificial General Intelligence https://chatgpt-a-step-towards-agi.yo.link

The World History from a global point of view https://the-world-history.yo.link

The History of Ukraine https://the-history-of-ukraine.yo.link

Art of War: A modern perspective https://art-of-war-a-modern-perspective.yo.link

Kamasutra: A modern perspective https://kamasutra-a-modern-perspective.yo.link

20 comments

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Is it possible to provide an option to enable ChatGPT to search the Internet for recent topics like LK-99 for example.
(comment deleted)
This is genuinely great. Wow. 7_hours_ago's suggestion:

> Is it possible to provide an option to enable ChatGPT to search the Internet for recent topics like LK-99 for example.

would make enough of a difference for me to say that this is the greatest project with the OpenAI API that I have ever used.

Currently we are restricted by knowledge cutoff of chatgpt.

If I understood correctly, you want a more advanced system, which would go search the internets for a given topic, collect a set of webpages around it, and come up with an organised presentation of information, in form of an article or a book.

It could also possibly suggest a set of topics given the users interests.

Sounds like an interesting and much more advanced project.

(comment deleted)
Had some fun with this ;)

TITLE: Why You Should Eat More Sand

1.1 The Nutritional Value of Sand

1.2 Sand as a Source of Minerals

1.3 Sand as a Source of Fiber

1.4 Sand as a Source of Protein

1.5 Sand as a Source of Carbohydrates

1.6 Sand as a Source of Essential Fatty Acids

That definitely should go to "Humour & Fun" category ) Seems like chatgpt is not factchecking the input, assumes it is true.
Amazing, wonderful, fantastic... I am trying to deploy it in Vercel, but I got error 500 (internal Error). Any suggestion?
Which template are you trying to deploy to Vercel? If you can send me the link to the template/GitHub issue/support ticket, I can try and debug it for you!
Thanks a lot! I just forked books-by-ai, and added a new project in Vercel. The only thing I added was my openai api key, in the enviroment.
Postgres storage must be added to vercel, it will define POSTGRES_PRISMA_URL env variable, which must be added to local .env file, to run locally.

You also need to define OPENAI_API_KEY env variable.

Will add instructions in the github README.

How do you set up the environment?
[flagged]
Currenlty I run out of OpenAI API credits, will try to restore the functionality, or let you run it with your own api key.
I'm having trouble getting the website to generate the book contents, what could I be doing wrong?