Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Confabulists
In 2020 I posted this, "Show HN: Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752 It got front page for a few hours. I posted in the anniversary of when The Count of Monte Cristo first started to be published in serialized form. To celebrate it, I created a website called "Serial Literature" that allowed you to subscribe and read the book in a similar way, serialized, but in your email. I also added another famous work that was initially published serialized, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I later added about other…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Confabulists launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1RT
2020 · serialliterature.com · its alternatives →
- 2IB
2023 · modernserial.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Literature in installments delivered to your email inbox.
2020 · serialliterature.com · its alternatives →
- 4
I think LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper. I built a system for Claude Code to browse 100 non-fiction books and find interesting connections between them. I started out with a pipeline in stages, chaining together LLM calls to build up a context of the library. I was mainly getting back the insight that I was baking into the prompts, and the results weren't particularly surprising. On a whim, I gave CC access to my debug CLI tools and found that it wiped the floor with that approach. It gave actually interesting results and required very little orchestration…
Jan 2026 · trails.pieterma.es · its alternatives →
- 5C1
Hi all, creator here :) I launched Shepherd.com on a Show HN in April 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660), and it has come a long way. My goal with Shepherd is to create an experience that feels like wandering your local bookstore, along with little notes from authors & experts sharing why each book is one of their all-time favorites. For 2023, I surveyed 1,200+ authors to get their three favorite reads of the year. Then I crunched that data and broke it by genre, age range, and when it was published. Publisher data is a nightmare, so some of the genres are…
2023 · shepherd.com · its alternatives →
- 6SW
Hi HN, Every year, we ask thousands of readers (and authors) to share their 3 favorite reads of the year. Now you can enter a book/author you love and see what books readers loved who also loved that book/author. Try it here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 This goes wide and doesn't try to limit itself to the genre, so you get some interesting results. What do you think? Background: I want better recommendations based on my reading history. I'm incredibly frustrated with what is out there. This system is based on 5,000 readers voting on their 3 favorite reads…
Dec 2025 · shepherd.com · its alternatives →
- 7
I T E M S Y▲158Turn your reading lists into a beautiful personal newsletter
2019 · its alternatives →
- 8
Obooko▲269Hey HN, I'm George. I spent few months rebuilding Obooko, a free ebook platform that's been around since 2010 with 11 million downloads. Reading is losing to scrolling, but BookTok has 370B+ views. People want book content, they're just not reading books. I think that’s because modern reading hasn’t kept up with the pace of the internet. What I built Obooko is ad-supported like YouTube. No paywall, no subscription, no account required. 4,000+ books across 30+ genres. You can read in the browser, sync across devices, or download as PDF/EPUB/Kindle. The reader is built on EPUB.js…
Feb 2026 · obooko.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Advice from one of the greatest direct response copywriters
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 105A
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…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 11CS
Hey HN, I am launching a newsletter tool for those who write fiction: https://writer.confabulists.com This is the page focusing on convincing writers to sign up. It is a two-sided marketplace (writers and readers), but since I am just starting, there are no published writers yet -- who write in English at least. So if you write fiction of any genre, professionally or not, I invite you to try it. Confabulists is the culmination of several personal experiences. First, I am trying to start a new career as a fiction writer. Which is hard. It is one type of content or art creation still…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 12NC
2019 · notimeforbooks.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 · anynewbooks.com · its alternatives →
- 14AI
Hello HN! In a recent "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread, I mentioned I was working on OCRing a large book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971614 The post generated some interest so I thought I would keep HN posted. The book is Saint-Simon’s Memoirs -- an invaluable historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, full of wit, sharp observations, and of incredible literary value. I'm OCRing the edition of reference made between 1879-1930, that contains a lot of comments and footnotes: 45 volumes, ~27,000 pages. Here's a link to a blog post that describes…
2024 · blog.medusis.com · its alternatives →
- 15MP
My story: I founded this a couple of years ago because my school (I was 11/12 at the time) had recently purchased a library system which was horrible and ugly. I thought it could be made much better, so I coded for months on end to get this product working. I submitted this to a TV competition on national TV and got the opportunity to pitch this product in front of 500,000 viewers. I received a bursary of €2,000 from the show and used that money to grow the business. Currently the business is thriving and is growing rapidly. I'd really appreciate any feedback you might have. Thanks, Shane
2013 · libramatic.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie! The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs. My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this…
2023 · boredreading.com · its alternatives →
- 17IB
Bookmarks which you wanted to read, but simply forgot... It happened to me all the time. I bookmarked the articles to read later and simply forgot about them. Forever. I built Mailist to help with that. Already 2350 users enjoy their "weekly digests" composed from their bookmarks. It makes me super happy! So now, https://mailist.app Pro account allows you to send an email newsletter every day, built from your bookmarks. Does it sound interesting? The free version (weekly email) is available for everyone! Let me know what you think. PS. Unlike other tools, we care about your privacy…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN, sharing something I've been working on. I love reading new voices. I subscribe to a lot of brilliant newsletters but found it hard to keep track of all the great stuff I was reading. I'd read something, love it, never be able to find it again. And then, how do you find new ones worth trying? And which posts do you start with? With Inbox World, you can submit and upvote the best of Substack and other similar platforms. The goal is to build a community around the best independent writing out there. It's like HN for newsletters! This is a passion project for me and I'm not technical at…
2022 · inboxworld.io · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20AB
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 · its alternatives →
- 21
Many of pmarca's older blog posts as an e-book
2015 · a16z.com · its alternatives →
- 22
It Works Now▲19Write what you want. Track when it happens. It works.
Feb 2026 · itworks.now · its alternatives →
- 23TN
I’ve been hacking on a project called Bookshelf (https://www.bookshelf.diy/). It lets you take an archive — say, your Substack export, a bunch of PDFs, or even saved HTML files — and turn that into a retrieval-backed GPT that your readers can query. The idea is: instead of scrolling archives, they just ask questions. Answers are pulled only from your original content, with citations. It’s aimed at writers and researchers who want their work to be more discoverable — but without spinning up vector infra or fiddling with RAG pipelines. For context: I’ve always gone back to Paul…
2025 · bookshelf.diy · its alternatives →
- 24NS
2012 · hntopbooks.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in installments in your email alternatives
- I built a website that lets you read classic books as email newsletters alternatives
- Serial Literature alternatives
- I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books alternatives
- Crunching 1,200 Authors' Favorite Reads of 2023 alternatives
- See what readers who loved your favorite book/author also loved to read alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →