Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I’m working on a collaborative ebook reading app. The idea is that you can create a reading group, invite people and then share comments and highlights and see each other’s reading progress.

It’s something I’ve been wanting for a while, for example to read a book with a group of friends or with a work team, but there’s lots of other possibilities including author reading parties, proofing and education. Got the basics of it working now, need to polish the UI and add the commenting and highlighting features.

I’m using Next.js and Supabase, neither of which I’ve used before so it’s been a fun but often frustrating process. Claude has been an amazing assistance, fixing my mistakes and countless type errors.

Cool! Lemme know if you want help with testing.

Hey man, it is an amazing idea. I have been thinking to build something similar.

I am building reading clubs for my custom library - on top of crypto tech, and in the process, I have experimented with several book reader tech. pdf.js, muPDF and some other tools, which one did you settle on?

My lib: https://datapond.earth

Ooooo.... Idea! One thing I've always wanted is an "asynchronous" book group. Basically, some way to tie the questions and conversation to a page or chapter, and then you can follow along at your own speed. Just passing the idea along since I'll never do anything with it.

I wish there were discussion websites for media like this. If I've finally watched a tv show, everyone is already talking about another season. I want some sort of "season one insulated forum" or something. For all those that are in the same "temporal" spot.

Not the same thing but if your show has a subreddit, they will probably also have discussion threads for each episode.

That’s a cool idea, thank you for sharing. Yes, I want to tie conversations to specific locations in the text, but I love the idea of being able to set discussion questions as well. Will look into that.

Somewhat similar to r/patientgamers - so r/patientreaders, r/patientwatchers, etc.?

That’s a fascinating project, thanks for sharing. I’m using epub.js as it already has things like annotations and highlighting and it’s fairly easy to override the book styles.

From the research I’ve done, it seems that most ebook reader libraries are old and not very well supported. Haven’t considered PDF readers yet.

good idea!

feature idea- you can see the reading progress of everyone in the group to sort of apply some passive social pressure to catch up if you're behind

then again, not everyone might be willing to do this since the book club might not all be about actually reading the book for them

This reminds me heavily of Perusall, which we used for a course in university. Take a look at it for “inspiration” - it might be interesting :)

Storygraph[1] does this with their Buddy Read feature. My wife and I use it to read books together and leave messages about different happenings, which only get unlocked when you mark that you've read up to that page in the book. It's a great feature, and we really enjoy it.

[1] https://www.thestorygraph.com/

same for research papers ( I think there is/are some prototypes but no big communities perhaps)

Is it going to be P2P? It would be much more easier to handle book versions and other such technocalities if it is, allowing people to share the EPUB via the platform and stay in sync