I wish Amazon focused on books instead of ecommerce.

The real disruption of books haven't really happened.

I thought eBooks and digital books would get us there, but it simply hasn't changed anything.

The Steam (valve software) of books hasn't happened yet.

I literally cannot run anymore without slowing everything down.

This is something which other software makers need to start considering.

There's actually limited RAM now on machines.

Codex and Claude Desktop both are gigantic memory hogs. And they leak memory all the time, but they provide value which is quite high.

Add in a couple of editors and the GitHub app. And then the actual browsers. And it actually stops me from downloading any more electron apps.

Could this be made into a native application?

I built this originally last year because I was frustrated that epubs even though they are digital are not being fully utilized.

I also read on many different platforms and I wanted all of my books to automatically sync.

I also have a bunch of friends who read the same books, so I built a little chatroom that you can get into if you all have the same book.

Lately voice models have gotten really good. So I also incorporated on device models which reads the book to you as an audiobook.

The app is in Tauri and using InstantDB for the database and backend sync. Really love the work stopachka and folks are doing with that.

Rust helps in doing a lot of the heavy lifting and onnx runtimes are great for cross platform model loading.

My kids also read on it so there is a pet (a cat or a dog) which can be a companion while you read and they move around and animate and tell you how many pages are left based on it's position on the page.

Long term I want to publish books from independent authors on this and have a directy publishing model but that's not there now.

Anyway, let me know if I can answer any questions about reading, rust, architecture, local models etc etc.

p.s. My fav author is Leo Tolstoy.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427848

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

So I built Anduin, with Iced and it has a bunch of keyboard shortcuts inspired by Magit that I have been using everyday.

If someone wants to try it, you can clone and cargo build.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407618

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book.

I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions.

It's still early but here are a couple of features:

1. A really solid cross platform epub reader

2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon)

3. Book chat where you can chat with the book and ask questions such as how to apply lessons to real life.

4. Chat with other readers, aka, a virtual book club which you automatically join if you have a book (also doesn't have to be an exact match. philoshopher's stone + sorcerer's stone for example would join the same club.

5. Background music that understands what you are reading and adapts accordingly (still clunky - I will do another pass soon).

I have been working on this for about a month now (started 3 months back but working on it only on weekends). It is a Tauri app so the sizes are really small (4MB). InstantDB is doing a lot of the syncing, auth, chat, stuff. (You don't need to login but it is recommended to get all the social features).

The goal is to have a place to publish books as well as read them as fewer people are reading and fewer new authors are getting published and to build a community of readers and authors and have a bunch of other interesting things which will make reading more fun and reward those activities.

Oh also there is an auto audiobook functionality coming soon and an iPad app coming soon where you can read some of the book, continue listening to the book in your car and then continue reading on the computer etc. I plan to replace the AI stuff with local models as soon as it is feasible.

Please let me know what other features would you want.

Here are the mac, linux, windows builds: https://getaugre.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43640067

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Basically I am building it for myself as some books are hard to read, and if I can substitute a paragraph or some sections with an ELI5 version that would get me through a lot more books and may it so much fun.

And I love chatting about books and that is half of the fun for me, so I am building it in the app itself.

Using Tauri and Rust for all of this because I don't like slow apps.

Will also build mobile apps next once I am done with the desktop versions as I like syncing where I read etc.

Do any of your companies have internal newsletters? Long form periodic updates increase communication a lot in my experience.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359788

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35304565

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

One gotcha specific to Supabase (where I run the backend) is because there is no anonymous login in Supabase, turning on RLS and using database functions marked as security definers are the way to go. Otherwise there is no easy way of stopping a 'select * from x' since some rows might not have a user_id if they are anonymous and I still want people to access the row if they know a specific primary key uuid.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32196079

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Imba has been a great language choice so far. It makes everything easy.

Now I have added authentication using Supabase, so you can login through Google oAuth or a magic link which allows you to have multiple pads and control if they are publicly viewable / editable or not.

Since Supabase doesn't have anon authentication, it is better to use rpc functions instead of adding policies. That way be default row level security blocks everything and rpc functions control who has access. That way I can prevent "select *" queries.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32182190

Points: 2

# Comments: 1