Alternatives
Products that do what Litnerd (YC S21) – Kids Book Club Meets Gaming does
Hi HN! Anisa here from Litnerd (https://www.litnerd.com). We’re a reading club for kids. It’s been two years since our first HN launch and I am back today to share some updates we're extremely excited about. Litnerd is an online reading club program with a weekly live meetup to help students make reading a lifelong habit. Think of us as “book club meets gaming”. New books go live weekly, and each book has movie adaptations, music, reading courseware, mini lessons with a virtual teacher and worksheets. There are reading tournaments every month to recognize the top reader. The goal…
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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
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Since 2005, Goodreads has been the default book tracking site, connecting millions of readers. But let’s be real—it’s barely changed in 20 years. It’s the same site it was, just with more ads. Still no half-star ratings. No proper DNF (Did Not Finish) option. UI still looks like it's from 2005. Amazon owns it and doesn't care. So I built Kaguya, a modern alternative, over the past 9 months. What’s live: Custom shelves (Organize however you want) Rich-text reviews (format your thoughts properly) 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars) DNF, On-Hold, and other reading statuses Likes,…
2025 · kaguya.io
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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
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An online community that enjoys reading and discussing engineering books together.
2023 · engineeringbookclub.com
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2025 · booktalk.club
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2021 · joinpageturner.com
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Hi HN, We’re Elizabeth, Catalin, and Tom - the founders of Ello (https://www.helloello.com). Ello is an AI-powered app that mimics the one-on-one interaction of a reading tutor by listening to, encouraging, and coaching kids grade K-3 as they read out loud from a real book. We posted on HN back in 2020 when we launched Trustle, a company designed to pair families with dedicated experts in child development. We learned from that experience that parents don’t want a consultant, but they do want actual help with specific challenges—one of the biggest being reading. Prior to COVID, 65%…
2023
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We’re a startup called Scholastica(http://bit.ly/rSYdfa), an academic journal publishing platform and scholarly community. We applied to Y-Combinator Spring 2011, PG actually wrote us to ask us some further questions, but unfortunately didn’t get in. With that said, we didn’t give up and have an application with some traction. We’re completely bootstrapped and would love for you guys to check us out and hear your thoughts. Problem:Academics spend their time doing research, then have other scholars peer-review this research at an academic journal, then journals hand over the articles they…
2012
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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
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