I was driving across the U.S. listening to an audio book about American History. Each chapter the author would mention influential books of the time. I was really impacted by the chapter on slavery and really wanted to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Whilst I've got through plenty of classics, with a job and family, I thought it was unlikely I'd sit down and read it cover-to-cover.
As I thought about it more, I realized that even though I have a Kindle, I rarely read it, but I always read my email on the bus on the way to work. So... what if I just received a page per day? The whole site is basically an experiment to answer that question. I'm enjoying it so far, and now I'll find out if others do too!
So far I'm finding you actually do have enough context to keep track of things. Maybe not get hooked (but there's also a 'request another page' link in the email for those days with bad traffic)
:)
Also, please send "a bunch of pages" at the time"
In other words if you can add this little gamification aspect and the idea that I have or can have more active control over what's delivered to me, I suspect you'll have better engagement. For me after the novelty of implementing my own a-page-a-day solution wore off and when I missed a few days then it just seemed like a chore to catch up with my missed reading.
And under Manage, you can pause, skip ahead or back etc. I decided to hold off on any features until I saw if folks actually enjoyed consuming content this way.
I'm calling it: Push to Read™️
My first job was at a supermarket. There was a big sign on the door saying "NO NEWSPAPERS". Memories.
And tabloids would sell more if they were 2-ply.
https://www.recommendmeabook.com/
I think it's brilliant for getting the ball rolling, no matter how small, on a book I would otherwise probably never read if I were just picking among titles.
I'm not sure that many people would want MORE email.
Years ago, I did something like this with Samuel Pepys' diary. I didn't get more than a week in and then I forgot. It was easy to get overwhelmed with the backlog and then I unsubscribed from the RSS feed.
I'm not sure that people have "no time for books." There's plenty of time for books. People are just not in the habit. There are ways to get into the habit, but I don't know that one page at a time is the easiest way.
So, I agree re: the habit. I'm out of the habit, but I'm definitely in the habit of reading my email, so I guess the idea is bringing the content to where the people are.
Definitely not clear yet if this will be 'a thing'
[1] thinking-about-things.com
Since I get most of my reading done on the throne (currently re-reading The Art of Profit by ), I really like the idea of a bite-sized reading app, especially for the non-fiction business books I mainly read.
What feedback have you received about the effectiveness of "one page at a time"?
Feedback includes:
- Some books are terrible for this, such as ones with lots of footnotes! A page of footnotes is no fun - Some feature requests for things like only sending a page if you 'ack' the page you've read - Some folks like it
Only thing I would suggest is showing some categories with several (3-4) books in each.
Thanks for the suggestion!
I just finished part 1 of a tale of two cities this way.
Plus, a big part of why I kept going with it was because I wanted to see how far I could push Cloudflare Workers as a pure app development platform... pretty far it turns out! (disclosure: I work at Cloudflare, although not on the Workers team).
Feel free to include my published book as well; it’s copyrighted in the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0. https://www.unitism.com/
If it becomes popular, I'd have to upgrade the plan and then you start getting servers with better IP reputations anyway.
Also, Tolstoy's 'War 'n Pieces'.
That said, a page/day via email and using public domain works seem like a better compromise.
- After entering my email address, I get a 500 error.
Shout out to the designer of that. The had a Vue version with components and it was super easy to modify. Templates have come a long way.
Having an API that deploys to ~200 cities instantly and then deploying the UI being as simple as wrangler deploy, pointing at my bundle directory means I could just focus on the fun stuff.
Can't wait to see where we go with this platform.
How about if one were to be able to set their own pace? Many blog sites have those “5minute read” things that naively just count the words or lines and map it to some average reading speed. Maybe even have a tool that measures your reading speed and then let users configure how many minutes of reading they want to allot.
Another possibility is to send an email that gives you time options instead. The email will consist of several button links (5, 10, 15min) and then each button will take you to a server side rendered page that has the allotted amount with a Done button at the end to bookmark the position.
Just some ideas. I would definitely sign up if it wasn’t just one page for sure!
