Alternatives
Products that do what 50books, a bare-bones reading list tracker does
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a project that I've been working on the last few days that I finally finished last night: https://50books.org This is a simple site designed to track your reading list into 2015. My personal goal is to read 50 books this year, and I wanted to hold myself accountable. Major sites like Goodreads are great, but were too much of a social network for my personal taste; on the other hand, using a text file (which was my 2014 solution) was too difficult to track and share. I built https://50books.org using Sinatra, sqlite3 (via datamapper), and…
- 1MS
Hi HN! I'm Ivan, a developer and avid reader who was constantly frustrated by the "what to read next?" problem after finishing a great book. I tried tracking books on my phone, but it felt clunky and unreliable—I worried about losing my data when switching devices. When I looked at existing online solutions, they felt overly complex and bloated for what should be a simple task. So I built MyRead: a fast, modern book tracker that's both private and persistent, running entirely in your browser. Core philosophy: your data belongs to you. Everything is stored exclusively in your browser's…
2025 · myread.space
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- 5RM
2021 · reclist.me
- 60A
I wanted to share a project that I've been working on designed to help young kids go from reading single words to reading whole books. My husband and I started spending a lot of time teaching our 5-year-old (Alex) to read because our school district is exclusively doing remote learning and I was skeptical that he could learn to read over Zoom. We used flashcards (which Alex found boring) and then combined them into sentences (which Alex found interesting). But the sentence approach requires a lot of arranging pieces of paper and remembering which words you are working on. So I developed…
2020
- 7AN
Hi guys, yesterday I launched a new book notification service called 'Any new books?': http://anynewbooks.com The idea is that you enter your email, subscribe to a few categories of your interest, and then you'll receive one weekly email per category with a list of new interesting books that were just released. The first day was pretty good I think, with many people signing up. Among these, I've already spotted a few key players in our industry (which I take to be a positive sign, of course) and the feedback I've been receiving by email has been very positive so far. I'm posting this here…
2010
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Hi guys. I’m looking for some feedback from the great HN community. I just soft launched the beta version of my humble bookshelf application, bookqueue. I've been working on it as a pet project since 2007. The idea is having a place to track all books you have been reading and having some nice stats around it, with less focus in the social aspects. My own queue can be found here: http://bookqueue.net/caffo You can also create your own at http://bookqueue.net/ Thanks!
2011
- 10AS
http://readdis.com Hey everyone, Readdis is a project that I've been working on recently and I would love to get your feedback on it. I originally wrote it for internal use to help my team and I better track the links that we send to each other. We found it quite useful so I decided to open it up and see if anyone else was interested. It definitely is at the MVP stage right now with lots of things left to be done. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, ideas, and most importantly, comments on whether or not you find it useful. Thanks! Kevin
2010
- 11DB
Ankit Ranka and I built this for ourselves and it was kind of useful, so we decided to package it up and see if others find it useful too. Ankit is an avid reader, but never new what book to read on the weekend. I'm always trying to find a new movie on Friday night to unwind. I usually end up spending 30-45 minutes looking for a movie, and by the time I find one I don't feel like watching a movie anymore! We built ScoutFeed to monitor our Twitter feeds and help us find books and movies that people we follow tweet about. It turns out people recommend apps and songs on twitter too, so we…
2012 · scoutfeed.sherlabs.com
- 12HN
I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good…
2015
- 13FFetchnotes▲17
We just launched our startup tonight! It's called Fetchnotes, and it's a note-taking application for short notes like books to read, shopping lists and ideas. Check out our website at www.fetchnotes.com. We're on the web, Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows and Ubuntu — and you can even text or email in your notes. We were just covered in TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch/IBfr9C), and we'd love for you to check it out and give us your feedback. You can send it to me (Alex Schiff) and my co-founder (Chase Lee) at [email protected], or use our UserVoice forum at fetchnotes.uservoice.com. Also, we're…
2012
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I built Read Fast after realising I was saving hundreds of things to read and reading almost none of them. It automatically turns saved content into a scheduled briefing and sends it to my inbox at whatever time I choose. New version since last post actually allows you to bulk upload URLs. So you can just dump links here and Read Fast will scrape and brief for you. Great for actually reading the things I want to. Curious if that resonates with people?
Dec 2025 · read-fast.replit.app
- 15IM
Hey Book Lovers! Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Biblio.com, your new social playground for everything books! Whether you're a voracious reader, budding author, or just someone who loves to explore new ideas through the written word, Bibliou has it all. With Bibliou, you can: Upload your own stories, novels, or poems and share them with the world Read an ever-growing library of books and writings by other users – discover hidden gems! Follow authors, readers, and creators whose content you love – build your literary network Create reading lists, leave reviews, and join discussions in…
2024 · bibliou.com
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The previous submission [1] didn't catch on, so re-trying with a less substantive title! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41680056
2024 · authorlens.com
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I spent a lot of time going through the recent thread: Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756432) so I made this website to browse through it later and get the books I want from Amazon. It gets the comments using the HN API, uses the Open AI API to extract book names, and then the Amazon API to find the book on Amazon.
2024 · hnbestbooks.pages.dev
- 18IS
Hey folks, I wanted to share my latest project, which is a book that I wrote and self-published. The book is called Behind the Ivy Curtain: A Data Driven Guide to Elite College Admissions, and the link is http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013YFIQ30. Let me give you some backstory. I went to a fun high school but it was really easy and fun and I was a pretty big slacker. Around sophomore spring I decided I wanted to leave Florida, and the best way to do that was to get a scholarship to a good school. I had no idea how to do that so I spent a bunch of time reading…
2015
- 19IB
Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-D I prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission. If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/ After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and…
Jun 2026 · epub.mirror.forum
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Over the weekend I wrote a small web app that takes an RSS feed for a blog, grabs the feed, cleans up the HTML, strips out small irrelevant images and compiles them into an e-book with chapter anchors. It requires a Google login since it uses the Google Reader "API". As an example, I was going on a long vacation and had recently discovered Paul Buchheit's blog. I used this tool (which was then just a Python script) to create an e-book and I literally read his blog "cover to cover". It's still rough around the edges, but I figured I'd iron those out if at least one other person thinks they…
2011
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Hey everyone! I know that a lot of people want to make more time for reading in their lives, but don't always have the time to do so. So I've created Summrize, an online platform for reading FREE non-fiction book summaries. For each book, I've condensed the most important concepts, quotes, actionable insights, frameworks and case studies, and presented them in a beautiful format. You can save the snippets that resonate the most with you, and share them on other platforms too! We know there exist other similar platforms (Blinkist, Shortform), but my goal with Summrize is to make access to the…
2024 · summrize.com
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Hey HN community, there are a couple of websites I visit on a daily basis. I type the first two oder three characters of the url and the autocomplete feature of my browser does the rest. That is also how I procrastinate. It happens that i visit the same website over and over again without that there is really new content on that site. Or on the other side it happens that I forget to visit a certain site for some days. To address all this I build the following website: https://everyday-favs.com The idea is: you have one personal link (1) and define a list of websites and how often…
2021
- 23IM
Hey HN, the full story is on the page, but here's the TL;DR: I'm 35 and somewhere along the way I lost the ability to finish reading articles. I'd open them, read 2-3 paragraphs, get distracted, and close the tab feeling like a failure. My "Read Later" list became a graveyard of 2,000+ unread articles. I tried everything – focus apps, reader modes, blocking extensions. Nothing worked. Then I realized. 'maybe the problem isn't me'. Modern web articles are designed for engagement metrics, not comprehension. Sidebars, popups, related articles, comment sections – everything is optimized to pull…
Jan 2026 · parsely.obasic.app
- 24BA
Hey guys, I drive to work a lot, spending on average of 2 hours each day. So I have plenty of time to listen to Podcast and audiobook on my ride. And I think it would be nice to be able to do the same with my reading list, but I couldn't find any decent app on the market that doing this. So I set out to do it myself. Sooo this is the product: http://sendtopod.com/ You may ask why? The reasons are simple: - It's more convenient to listen to articles while you driving, running, or even before going to bed. - Listen take less effort than reading. - Your eyes need to rest after…
2022 · sendtopod.com
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