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Products that do what A new way to read books, magnifying in and out does
After watching The Odyssey, I thought it would be cool to check out some scenes from the source in detail, but I don't have time to read the whole book. So I came up with a sort of zoom/microscope, that allows to see the whole book at a glance and then zoom in (by pinching) on the part I'm interested in. I can do so down to the actual source text and get the authentic feel the author intended, at the same time I better understand where am I in the text and also the character and places are clickable so I can quickly orient myself on the context. Moreover each character has relationships…
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Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es
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2021 · loudreader.com
- 3AO
Hi HN! I've been working on BookWith, an open-source e-book reader that integrates AI as your reading companion. The problem: Traditional e-readers are passive. When you encounter something unclear, you have to context-switch to search for it. Your highlights and notes remain isolated, and you can't easily connect ideas across different books. My solution: BookWith embeds an AI that maintains full context of what you're reading. It features: - Context-aware AI chat: Ask questions about the current page/chapter and get instant answers - AI podcast generation: Automatically converts book…
2025 · github.com
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2017 · bookeyes.co
- 6AC
I built ProRead to prevent stalling on long passages and to keep the overall context clear. Features * Bird’s-eye overview with drill-down to any level * Interactive maps showing concept links * Quick switch between chapter summaries and original text * Contextual AI Q\&A * Text-to-speech for any book or summary level * EPUB upload for instant access Includes nine classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) and support for your own books. I arrived at this by piecing together LLM-based workflows for reading until I decided to build a dedicated tool. Feedback welcome.
2025 · proread.ai
- 7
- 8AI
This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)". 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…
2025
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Hey HN! I built ProRead to solve the problem of getting stalled by walls of text in books or losing the big picture while reading. Key features: • Start from a bird's-eye view, then zoom into any level of detail • Interactive knowledge maps show how concepts connect • Seamlessly navigate between chapter summaries and original text • Ask questions in context with AI assistance • High-quality text-to-speech for any book, any level of summary • Upload any EPUB and start reading immediately We have 9 curated classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) ready to explore, plus you can…
2025 · proread.ai
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2015 · gethibou.com
- 12
- 13BA
Hey HN! I’m Miran Antamian, founder and CEO of BookWatch, and I’m thrilled to introduce BookWatch.com. The first AI-powered Visual Library for learners who hate reading but love growing. After 1.5 years of building, 65,000+ mobile app users, and countless animated summaries, we’re launching our New Web App to make learning even more effortless. The Problem: Visual Learners Can’t Learn from Books in Text or Audio Formats Did you know that 65% of people identify as visual learners? Yet most book knowledge remains trapped in text format. Many of us want the wisdom of great books but struggle…
2025 · bookwatch.com
- 14AB
Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Jun 2026 · tryquincy.live
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- 16HS
I asked Codex 5.6 Sol Medium to one-shot a tree-view version of The Odyssey because I wanted to familiarize myself with it before I see the film. Think of it as an interactive Cliffs Notes where you can stay high level or drill down to the source text. I used Gemma-4-26B-A4B locally to do the summarization. Codex wrote the scripts, HTML tree viewer, and babysat the summarization pipeline. Each of the Odyssey's 24 books is distilled into a paragraph. When you click a paragraph, each paragraph of the source has been distilled to one sentence. Tapping any one sentence shows you the source…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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2020 · chrome.google.com
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I am not sure if this is useful for anyone else but I recently found myself converting a lot of books / magazines and content to NotebookLM Deep Dives, so, I wrote this quick plugin to do that in single click. I find this is a nice way to go through a lot of content (during commute etc.) and pick interesting stuff to read. Think of it as skimming a book and deciding to read it.
26d ago · github.com
- 19IB
I use AI while reading the Bible and I suspect others do too. It's helpful whether you're struggling with the Elizabethan English, or want added context/want to know what theologians say about a passage. So I thought, why not make the AI come to you? TIA for any feedback!
2025 · scripturia.com
- 20AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
- 21TA
Let's try a small experiment with LLMs that have a large context length: feed an entire book into the context window and ask it to generate a list of characters, their relationships, and physical descriptions—data that can later be used for image generation. In this repository, you can find two tools: a script that extracts data from book text using an LLM (Gemini or OpenRouter API) and an HTML/JS (D3) visualization of the character graph. An external text-to-image model can be used to generate character illustrations (a Google Colab example is provided). Explore the visualizations,…
2025 · github.com
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2019 · readerschatter.com
- 23EB
2018 · brainab.com
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