I don't get what's the point on this. In my opinion a single page has barely content enough to develop anything interesting and because of it, it could be quite difficult to bring the context of the previous page every day you read a new one. I can't see how one can get hooked to read a book this way.
It's an experiment really. I probably should have included the origin story somewhere...
I was driving across the U.S. listening to an audio book about American History. Each chapter the author would mention influential books of the time. I was really impacted by the chapter on slavery and really wanted to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Whilst I've got through plenty of classics, with a job and family, I thought it was unlikely I'd sit down and read it cover-to-cover.
As I thought about it more, I realized that even though I have a Kindle, I rarely read it, but I always read my email on the bus on the way to work. So... what if I just received a page per day? The whole site is basically an experiment to answer that question. I'm enjoying it so far, and now I'll find out if others do too!
So far I'm finding you actually do have enough context to keep track of things. Maybe not get hooked (but there's also a 'request another page' link in the email for those days with bad traffic)
It definitely helps to understand the purpose of the service :) it doesn't match with my reading habits but I'm sure many others will be interested. Good luck!
Yep, those endorphins will mask the sweet pain of having 87 pages unread and knowing that number will keep growing ceaselessly until it is just another unread copy of the book in your inbox.
I think this is a great idea but I echo the critique that a single page isn’t enough.
How about if one were to be able to set their own pace? Many blog sites have those “5minute read” things that naively just count the words or lines and map it to some average reading speed. Maybe even have a tool that measures your reading speed and then let users configure how many minutes of reading they want to allot.
Another possibility is to send an email that gives you time options instead. The email will consist of several button links (5, 10, 15min) and then each button will take you to a server side rendered page that has the allotted amount with a Done button at the end to bookmark the position.
Just some ideas. I would definitely sign up if it wasn’t just one page for sure!
Page breaks are not necessarily good breaks in the story. Your sample image on your page shows that it broke in the middle of a sentence. I would think that would make this a difficult way to read a story.
What feedback have you received about the effectiveness of "one page at a time"?
Indeed. The pagination algorithm is terribly naive. It's 2000 chars x the page you're up to. Breaking on a sentence or paragraph would be better. v1.1!
Feedback includes:
- Some books are terrible for this, such as ones with lots of footnotes! A page of footnotes is no fun
- Some feature requests for things like only sending a page if you 'ack' the page you've read
- Some folks like it
Implement this as an android app instead of email. Have a system where I can open a random page of a book in a genre as many times as I want for free, and I can continue reading from that page, but if I read through x continuous pages I have automatically bought the book (or a chapter of it) and it goes in my library.
I think it's brilliant for getting the ball rolling, no matter how small, on a book I would otherwise probably never read if I were just picking among titles.
There are apps for reading books. I like the random part and yeah you could make it pretty slick to convert to paid only if there's a decent level of engagement.
I actually implemented something like this for my ownself.
I have a suggestion that you may want to try out as an experiment.
Somehow give the user the ability to choose when to receive the next update (and maybe even how much). So for example I know I'm going to be busy the next couple of days but I want to keep the continuity, so maybe I can schedule to have only a couple of paragraphs sent to me. Or I know I'm going to be bored out of my mind this weekend I can schedule a page sent to me every 4 hours.
In other words if you can add this little gamification aspect and the idea that I have or can have more active control over what's delivered to me, I suspect you'll have better engagement.
For me after the novelty of implementing my own a-page-a-day solution wore off and when I missed a few days then it just seemed like a chore to catch up with my missed reading.
Thanks for the suggestion! Glad to know I wasn't the only one that a page a day appealed to! If you sign up, the footer of each email does actually have:
- Request another page
- Manage
- Unsubscribe
And under Manage, you can pause, skip ahead or back etc. I decided to hold off on any features until I saw if folks actually enjoyed consuming content this way.
I think just basic reply commands might be cool like : « next », « next 3 » to get 3 pages at once ...
I wanted to do this with with sms or messenger or WhatsApp bots
SMS/WhatsApp would be a cinch, the APIs look similar to email sending APIs. It's on my backlog, but I never actually really answered the question of why you'd want that? When would you prefer an SMS/WhatsApp message over an email? The biggest complaint folks have is around lack of context for a single page, which would be exacerbated by an even shorter text message?
Your thumbnail of the Iliad is of the Robert Fagles translation, which is not in the public domain.
I'm not sure that many people would want MORE email.
Years ago, I did something like this with Samuel Pepys' diary. I didn't get more than a week in and then I forgot. It was easy to get overwhelmed with the backlog and then I unsubscribed from the RSS feed.
I'm not sure that people have "no time for books." There's plenty of time for books. People are just not in the habit. There are ways to get into the habit, but I don't know that one page at a time is the easiest way.
Oh! Thanks for the note on the cover. Will change that. Don't want any nasty letters about copyright.
So, I agree re: the habit. I'm out of the habit, but I'm definitely in the habit of reading my email, so I guess the idea is bringing the content to where the people are.
Definitely not clear yet if this will be 'a thing'
Slightly OT, but if you want to read Samuel Pepys there’s a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/samuelpepys which is posting his diary in (more or less) real-time as if he had been tweeting rather than writing a diary. It works surprisingly well, and was honestly quite moving as they went through the Great Fire of London a while back.
Hi! You should take a look at https://mjml.io/ (not a service I am associated with, simply one of the easiest to use) and make a responsive email template for your service. If you have a contact somewhere, I'd be willing to help you out with that if you need assistance.
I was sitting on a pile of tech book pdf's but realized I simply wasn't going through them (and was wasting my life endlessly refreshing social media feeds). I threw together a web service which serves up a random page from a random book and it has been great for engaging with these books -- just enough of a tease to make you want to dig in further. https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/1dabd7587662f8aa7652...
<sigh>. A "bookshelves" page to highlight good suggestions and moving the search up to the top are high on the list, but I'd got to the point I needed some real user feedback to get fired up to spend some more time on it.
Not affiliated, but I’ve been using an app called Serial Reader [0] which does this using push notifications for some time. It’s quite good and offers more than a page per day for those that want it.
Nice -- thanks for that. Very similar approach. The "5 minutes" or "20 pages" instead of one seems to be ringing through pretty clearly. Might make that an option when you subscribe.
Last week I wrote a shell one liner to find all the chapter titles in a book's ToC, grab the line numbers for each chapter start in the text, and head/tail the text into individual chapter files. These files are then sent to me via jabber one per morning and discarded.
I just finished part 1 of a tale of two cities this way.
Nice. I thought of doing a similar thing, but being a recovering startup guy, I was like, I should totally build this as a platform and let others read books this way. :p
Plus, a big part of why I kept going with it was because I wanted to see how far I could push Cloudflare Workers as a pure app development platform... pretty far it turns out! (disclosure: I work at Cloudflare, although not on the Workers team).
Anyone who enjoys this might enjoy an email newsletter I run, Thinking About Things [1], which sends readers a single interesting and thought-provoking link every morning. It's a similar idea - small, manageable parts of ideas for people who are too busy to pursue idea discovery full-time.
Hey there... so I've been considering user uploaded content. I think it could be a great alternative medium for self-publishing. Needs a bit more work, but I'll post back here if I release that.
This looks pretty cool, congratulations! I was wondering how you set up your email server to get around the automatic filtering a lot of email providers use on the user end. For example, I think Gmail automatically filters anything from a known AWS IP address.
It just uses the SendGrid API, I don't run the email server. They have a 100 emails per day on the free plan and while it goes to Updates or Promotions on Gmail, it doesn't get spammed (at least so far).
If it becomes popular, I'd have to upgrade the plan and then you start getting servers with better IP reputations anyway.
I really like the idea. However, the Chinese quote on this page “千里之行” should be “千里之行，始于足下。“ with the author as “老子”, otherwise, it's incorrect. Just my two cents.
It has to be public domain (and on Project Gutenberg), which typically means real old. The first book you mentioned is from 1974, so would still be in copyright.
Erm... new for me? I typed a 'page per day' in Google and didn't find what I was looking for. In essence, it's serializing books, which has been done for > 100 years. I have some more ideas as to where I'd like to take it though.
Thanks Zack! (Full disclosure, I work with Zack at Cloudflare on the Product team). The fact I could build the whole thing on Cloudflare Workers is one of the reasons I took it as far as I did. I like writing code, but i groan at the thought of setting up servers, even on the cloud. My last side project used ELBs with a node server and the whole thing was painful.
Having an API that deploys to ~200 cities instantly and then deploying the UI being as simple as wrangler deploy, pointing at my bundle directory means I could just focus on the fun stuff.
Thanks, I only want your email address when you've chosen a book. But yes, you're not guided to that well enough. The UI today is very much a template with some content replaced rather than being designed from the ground up to optimize for the sign up flow. Lots of opportunity to improve that.
Take my email so you can email me a list of books to choose from later. I look at so many new products and libraries every day that I had already forgotten the name of your site.
Since I get most of my reading done on the throne (currently re-reading The Art of Profit by ), I really like the idea of a bite-sized reading app, especially for the non-fiction business books I mainly read.
