Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader
Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there).<p>The problem: paperback/print always wins over digital and arguably e-ink. Our solution: make reading a unique and asynchronously social experience.<p>I've love to get some beta feedback and…
Hyperink's Crowd Reader is a digital reading platform offering Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" book. The platform delivers a social, interactive reading experience designed to compete with print by enabling… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader launched in 2012; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting. So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph. We also felt like…
2022 · booqsi.com · its alternatives →
- 2IS
Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…
Nov 2025 · book.sv · its alternatives →
- 3
Hey HN, cofounder of Readwise here. We've been working on this cross-platform reader app for about 2 years, excited to finally share it in public beta. Probably the most notable thing that makes Reader unique is that it supports almost any content type you could want to save/read/highlight: * web pages * emails/newsletters * PDFs * ePubs * twitter threads * youtube videos (with transcripts) * RSS feeds With all of your knowledge content in one place, we built powerful reading and highlighting, as well as a bunch of novel triage/organization features, so you can actually…
2022 · readwise.io · its alternatives →
- 4
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 · its alternatives →
- 5
So far I've used it to reference ideas from books I've read before. I've also used it to explore books I have not read before by asking the bot questions. Some people have told me they use it like a reading companion. They pause while reading the book if they have a question, and use Konjer to answer it.
2023 · konjer.xyz · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
- 9
The world's first 'fully' open source book
2015 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Discourse▲43New open source discussion platform from Jeff Atwood.
2014 · discourse.org · its alternatives →
- 11AW
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 · its alternatives →
- 12
An ESP32 e-reader. Contribute to atomic14/diy-esp32-epub-reader development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13MP
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 →
- 14
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15HL
Hi HN! A little over two years ago, Goodreads announced they were shutting off access to their API. I was using it to show what I was reading on my blog at the time, and started looking for alternatives. I found a few that showed potential. I'd been using Letterboxd for a few years at that point and felt it had something that was missing from GR and the others I found, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I decided to build it instead (I'm sure many creators can relate ). I made a post on the /r/cofounders subreddit about the idea, and found Ste. With me as a full-stack product dev…
2023 · hardcover.app · its alternatives →
- 16AC
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 · its alternatives →
- 17AS
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 · readdis.com · its alternatives →
- 18
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 · its alternatives →
- 19AI
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 · its alternatives →
- 20IB
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 · its alternatives →
- 21TN
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 →
- 22
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 · its alternatives →
- 23
Wander Off the Map. Find Something Wonderful.
2022 · locserendipity.com · its alternatives →
- 24PA
Hey HN! I've been working on PagePal, an eBook reader designed to help people with ADHD and/or poor memory actually follow and finish books (of course, many people with ADHD can read fine, I just happen to have the kind that gives me Dory-like working memory). A little over a year ago, I was trying to get into reading. I’d be enjoying a book, then hit a wall as soon as too many characters or place names came up (it doesn't take much — five character names and I’m lost). I remember thinking: “If I could just tap on a name and see who this is...”. Then I realised AI could make this…
2025 · pagepalapp.com · its alternatives →
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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 →