Hello HN,
I have been building Papyrus for the past few months. It is a simple web app that allows people to create ebooks easily.
Would love to hear your feedback.
Cool looks very nice! I might use it for my new years' resolution to write something:p I would only be cautious because I'd be afraid of losing data (what if I write a whole book with your site & suddenly you go offline) & on the pdf version there 's also a white border around the book, it might be nice to be able to remove this or change it. For the rest it looks very awesome! Nice templates, easy to use etc=)
Looks great. Nice feature that you can import content from any url. It's good that you can get started and see the product without signing in. Also a good guide.
This looks like a nice service. I could see myself using it. One thing I noticed on the front page is that you do strange things with punctuation. Examples:
"Import the contents from the web . Convert your blog to a book in one click."
Notice the space before the first period.
"Papyrus lets you create books in pdf,epub,kindle formats."
No spaces after commas and no 'and' before 'kindle'. Also, there is no space between the last period and "(Coming soon)" in the two rightmost feature sections.
The terms of service discuss a monthly subscription payment but I cannot find any fees listed anywhere on the website. I assume it's free for now and sometime in the future they'll announce pricing. What if I don't like the pricing model? Can I export my content and sell my book somewhere else? How easy is it to get my book out of Papyrus?
The books are available as epub,pdf and mobi as of now.All the content that you would create will be yours forever.
You could always sell the books on any platform you like.(Like iBooks,Kindle,Nook). Example of a book created using Papyrus and being sold on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009OU5E3K
I went straight into book editing mode, since I plan on publishing an ebook in the following months.
The experience has been slightly frustrating. For instance, Shift+Enter when editing the contents of the title doesn't work as advertised. And when trying various things in desperation/frustration, a section of text popped up on me from nowhere, and I couldn't find a way to remove it.
I'd say the product has a lot of promise, but you have a long way to go until you reach MVP stage.
Oh no, I wasn't commenting on the design really. I think the design is just fine. I was referring to the joke that a comment above me refers to.
"What's black and white and red all over" A newspaper. It's a play on words where "red" is supposed to be "read". I thought maybe you had that in mind when you chose the colors. It would be really clever and funny if you did. If anyone ever asks you that you should totally tell them yes. I bet they'd get a kick out of that.
He's not saying it's bad -- he's saying that the color scheme is reminiscent of the old joke "What's black and white and red all over" ("A newspaper" as in "re[a]d all over")
The joke also applies to ebooks if you do well, so could be a very appropriate one.
Is your project similar to Leanpub? Is your goal to be an alternative to Leanpub? I'd love to see some competition in this space. It's a big space, a big market.
I recently made a service named Docverter[1] that attacks this from the other end, where you write your book in Markdown or various other markup formats and produce ebook files via pandoc and calibre. It's way more do-it-yourself, but it could be a useful backend for this or other services.
I've wanted something like this for going on two years. I even went so far as to start building it (wireframe: http://basseq.com/fun/epub/; some epub publishing code written), too, but lost momentum back in September and it's been sitting in my project folder.
So I'm excited someone took this further. I'll be playing with this more. Drop me a line if you're looking for more thoughts, feature ideas, or help.
Tried creating an ebook out of some of my old blog posts. Import from URL feature is pretty cool. Loved it. The frictionless way to try the app is also great. Bookmarking the site. Can I import a couple of my Dropbox docs directly?
One note - I happened to have my screen quite narrow when I opened it and as the menu-bar wrapped around it obscured the "Import Chapter from Url" button. The introductory guide pointed to where it thought the button should be but it was just highlighting a corner of the "Feedback and Support" button.
44 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread"Import the contents from the web . Convert your blog to a book in one click."
Notice the space before the first period.
"Papyrus lets you create books in pdf,epub,kindle formats."
No spaces after commas and no 'and' before 'kindle'. Also, there is no space between the last period and "(Coming soon)" in the two rightmost feature sections.
1)Has a cover designer built into the app
2)You could import content directly from anywhere on the web. (File import coming soon)
3)There are a set of themes,you could choose from.(Abilty to customize themes and a few more themes will be rolled out soon)
4)This might not be a differentiating factor,but we have tried to keep the editing process simple.
The experience has been slightly frustrating. For instance, Shift+Enter when editing the contents of the title doesn't work as advertised. And when trying various things in desperation/frustration, a section of text popped up on me from nowhere, and I couldn't find a way to remove it.
I'd say the product has a lot of promise, but you have a long way to go until you reach MVP stage.
Thanks again for trying it out.
"What's black and white and red all over" A newspaper. It's a play on words where "red" is supposed to be "read". I thought maybe you had that in mind when you chose the colors. It would be really clever and funny if you did. If anyone ever asks you that you should totally tell them yes. I bet they'd get a kick out of that.
The joke also applies to ebooks if you do well, so could be a very appropriate one.
Really Usable Product. Would love to publish some books with this.
looking forward for more advance features - full screen, double page editing, collaborative editing and review comments ?
[1]: http://www.docverter.com
So I'm excited someone took this further. I'll be playing with this more. Drop me a line if you're looking for more thoughts, feature ideas, or help.
One note - I happened to have my screen quite narrow when I opened it and as the menu-bar wrapped around it obscured the "Import Chapter from Url" button. The introductory guide pointed to where it thought the button should be but it was just highlighting a corner of the "Feedback and Support" button.