Alternatives
Products that do what Turn your “read later” folder into a physical book does
Hi HN! Being locked down with plenty of time in my hands, I clearly noticed a problem that I faced and also felt passionate about tackling. - Excessive screen time in our day-to-day - Diminishing attention spans It was consistently tough to properly read quality longform content online. From screen related tiredness to having ads and notifications pop up and demand a share of my attention, my focus was compromised. Long story short, I wanted to read longform content that lives online (and there is a ton of high quality out there), in an inherent offline medium, paper :p Fast forward 5…
- 1BM
Hey HN crowd! Two days ago I realized I'm almost unable to read a book or a long article without getting distracted by Twitter/HN/Reddit/Work. The situation is so terrible, I'm even getting afraid of big articles, and my ReadItLater list is getting pretty long (shameful I know) ... and I'm pretty sure most of you are in this situation :) Being used to TL;DRs on long reddit posts, I thought it would be great to have these for everything, so I quickly hacked this website: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/ Here is an example of TL;DR: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/5tropy I would love to…
2011
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- 3IM
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
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- 6IB
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
- 7SR
Hey all, this is a small bookmarklet my partner made last week to save short summaries of long-winded web posts. Hopefully you can help others save time by sharing your TL;DRs with the world. You can also up/downvote the TL;DRs other users post. It should work with your iPad, too. http://tldrplz.com
2011
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- 10AB
Recently i stumbled on too many clickgates on the Medium blog Towards Data science. Considering that most people publish to share knowledge on Medium and are driven into putting their content behind a paywall, without actually getting paid for it, including myself. I felt like Medium is running the academic publishing scheme. Get free content and get paid for it. So I decided to create a small script to bypass the paywall on Medium, it turns out it also works on other newssites. Heres the website: https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium/ For the curious I will explain the…
2019
- 11AN
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
- 12TH
Hi HN, Like many of you, I found myself discovering dozens of great posts on HN and never actually finding the time read them. I used to save every cool link to Pocket, but… well… same story — I rarely found the time to read them. So I thought it'd be great to listen to the top articles, the same way I listen to podcasts. Initially, I tried out narrating articles with latest text-to-speech synthesis from Amazon and Google, but it was still pretty bad. Especially with long form content. So I thought I'll do this with real humans, real voice actors. So I made ReadByHumans. [1] We are starting…
2017
- 13FO
I've just launched a landing page for an ebook that I hope to have out sometime in June but I feel like that dog in the meme "I have no idea what I'm doing."[1] I am not a designer (or copywriter) but I've been hanging out on HN long enough to have a good idea where to go for help. I used Bootstrap[2] for a template, Colour Lovers[3] for a palette and Weebly's homepage[4] for inspiration. Weebly's homepage is fantastic but as much as I tried to keep it simple and powerful, like Weebly, I kept getting bogged down in massive amounts copy. I think this is probably where I need to most help.…
2012
- 14RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021
- 15HC
hey HN, I am re launching an HN client app that i built this year. It got very little traction when i launched earlier. Following YC advice to do multiple launches, I am going to give it another shot. It’s fairly basic, but here are some of the features that I hope you would like. - Minimal, distraction-free UI - keyword based search functionality to see past stories. - Dark mode support - Breeze through comments with collapse functionality. - Bookmark your favourite stories to read later or revisit any time - All your reading history is saved. - Export reading history when you want it. I…
2025
- 16DC
As a personal need I have been working on building this over the last year. Like others, I often found myself in the middle of work, but taking breaks to read Reddit, HN, watch YouTube videos, etc. Those short breaks often turned into doom scrolling, and before I knew it I had wasted hours throughout my day/week. I felt that if I just had the content that I was already consuming bundled up and delivered to me in a daily newsletter, I'd no longer have the need to keep checking these sites throughout the day. This eventually evolved into adding sources that I was not wasting time on but…
2024 · usedigest.com
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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
- 18LT
I struggle with wanting to read heaps of stuff I come across on the internet daily, as well as being subscribed to a bunch of tech-related newsletters that I never get around to reading. I made this to get through that content much faster while working or otherwise multitasking. Check it out and please lmk your thoughts! Also, curious if others also feel this pain of too much interesting content to get through daily. FWIW I probably listen to this for >1 hour daily atm.
2024 · lavalamp.ai
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Made this app because I was tired of not knowing 50 words/book when I read in English. You can try it on the AppStore searching "Quicky app". For Android user please use the web mobile version at https://quicky.app/. The Desktop version has a shitty responsive design. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are not French, you will want to tell you are to try the features of the app (sorry it's only in French though) I'd love to hear your feedback.
2019
- 20WS
Lately, I've realized I'm spending a lot of time on HN. I've also realized that my brain uses it as a some sort of "escape" route: whenever I'm dealing with something complicated, my brain defaults to Cmd+T + "news..". So I've decided that I need to stop continuously browsing HN. BUT, I still don't want to miss the relevant news, events and discussions. That's why I've built this very simple, statically generated summary of HN posts (by year, month and week): https://hn-summary.github.io/ I think it's also a good way to filter the noise and only focus on those relevant posts…
2022
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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.
25d ago · github.com
- 22RA
If someone here reads on Medium a lot, this might be useful for you: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mediumship This is my second browser extension and it's open-source. It lets you read all Medium stories for free. Hugs and / or bugs welcome!
2019
- 23VN
I got the idea of [mindmap.so](http://mindmap.so/) out of my own frustration of managing my personal notes in Notion and Miro in parallel. I have built it 3 months back on top of excalidraw, posted it in Reddit a couple of times, and never looked back (was using it only for personal use). Little did I know that the small and nimble tool that I created has crossed 2000+ users (was so surprised when I saw the dashboard last week). It was all organic and word of mouth . Having 2000+ users trusting a product is no easy feat. That’s when I thought may be I should put some more…
2024 · mindmap.so
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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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