It's sort of weird how few people have ever checked out Nostr e-books (Kind 30040). We don't really mind, as replacing Amazon Kindle with something more functional, elegant, and uncensorable is a good bet, but it's still... wierd.
It's the only branch of Nostr that contains anything anyone might want to censor. After all.
Did you just say books?! π Where can I find this pot of gold that thou speaketh of?
Thank you! ππ»ππ»
So if one wanted to check such things out, where might we go to be looking for that?
https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu
.com has no next edition. Forgot.
Iβm incredibly excited about it, but also in the camp of not being fully in the loop. I will bookmark this note and check back later
I think we move slowly, like a glacier, working in the background on stuff like an AI for mass-converting PDF to Asciidoc, and performance improvements, and containerizing the server landscape and etc., so it seems like nothing is going on, even tho it's a small horde of active developers, admins, and testers scrambling around.
But it has to handle millions of publications and one publication could be the Encyclopedia Britannica. We have to revamp and reengineer a lot, under the hood, but it seems to be working. Better than we originally expected.
I guess it sorta seems like pie-in-the-sky stuff.
and why not?
The vision is too grand. Way out of scope of what Nostr is normally aimed at. We're just supposed to be tweeting and selling each other home-knitted sweaters and stuff.
This is a Big Data project that doesn't need any influencers or hype to be interesting, which is why it attracts little funding, but lots of developers.
We announces that we were going to move all out of copywrite texts we could find on the Internet onto Nostr relays and everyone was like *polite clap*.
No, but fr, tho. π
We're going to scrape books and publications off of everything and turn Nostr into a new InternetArchive.
But with zaps. π
Excellent.
Iβm getting interest from academics in my life who are publishing work that they fear will be censored. They are not nostr nativesβthey probably donβt even know nostr exists yet, except for my short conversations with them. Where should I point them for uploading their writing and research?
They're actually going to be the focus of the next version (named "Euler"), so you can show them our first research paper test case. That's a real paper, we pulled off of open access.
You can see, that we still need to render embedded Asciidoc and LaTeX properly and fix the footnotes, and stuff, but you can get the general idea. Euler will also allow them to export to LaTeX files, which is nice.
I used my CLI for uploading, but if they wait a couple of weeks, they can upload over #Alexandria, which will be more comfy.
Easy to read on mobile, as well, and Euler will come with the e-paper capability. So, they can read Nostr-published papers on their Kindle or whatnot, and write annotations or comments, etc.
We actually have universities interested in this, so that's why we're doing scientific papers before book clubs.
If they're curious enough, please point them our way. We want to build a home for them & their work.
I will for sure
nostr:nprofile1qqsv8szwuj5yxnd3cz5fsmpu29hk3fuy5zqkd3nz33zyv03z0k6q2espp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmqpzfmhxue69uhk7enxvd5xz6tw9ec82cs95ktkx don't know if you've seen these developments, seems up your alley (at least last I heard)
Hi nostr:npub1fhpw2ux9flhcxyl6xp84996qgnkkcy59zqzjvq9fhpxcx7upymus69ds8n, how are you?
I hadnβt seen these developments, thanks! About my previous project, unfortunately I havenβt been able to continue the project because Iβve been working two jobs to pay for my masterβs degree. But Iβll try to take a look and see if I can contribute something to this repo
Best off talking to the PO about it. nostr:npub1wqfzz2p880wq0tumuae9lfwyhs8uz35xd0kr34zrvrwyh3kvrzuskcqsyn
This is absolutely an amazing mission. As an academic, I despise PDFs. They're just a terrible medium for communicating scientific work, not to mention the fact that malware can be stuffed into them. It's frustrating to see my published research essentially get handicapped/walled off of any kind of novel and innovative interaction with the content.
One of our project team members is a biologist and I also come from a bionformatics background (Human Genome Project). So, we understand the problem that needs to be solved.
Nice! As in, the Human Genome Project from the early 2000s?
Yeah, I worked on software used to plot the arrays and on a project to create a visual model of scientific journal articles.
Sequencing has come a long way since then. You can sequence the human genome with a USB-connected device that's no bigger than a raspberry pi.
Anyway, I'll be sure to follow the latest from the project.
And another one is a physicist
Very nice, yes.
And there's a mathematician, at least two electrical engineers (I think the mathematician is also an EE), a DevOps engineer, and a computer scientist. I think two comp sci, actually. π€ Losing track.
And real writers doing the testing, and two of the writers are professional software testers.
TOTAL DREAM TEAM, BABY! π
Is the biologist on here?
Yes as a scientists as well I always prefer a journal article that has a web-readable format, because then it will (most of the time) scale nicely to a mobile device...
But what is the alternative for a "portable" format? ePub?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by alternative to a portable format
By "portable" I guess that means take the article offline... store on your phone, for a plane trip, etc. Right now PDF is basically the way to do that, unless you're cacheing the web page or something...
Okay I see what you mean. To me the gold standard really is just plaintext. For scientific reporting, you can mark up reports with simple tools like asciidoc. So now you have a format-agnostic presentation that can be consumed any way you like, transmitted through essentially anything you like, for example Nostr or whatever offline reader.
Quite the opposite from saying "this is the (probably DRM'd) format, it has text embedded, and you can only use X/Y/Z (probably locked/closed/restricted) app to consume it".
Yeah, I just download the publication events (they're in Asciidoc) to the #Citrine relay on my phone, or to the nostr-rs relay on my laptop, and then they can be read offline.
But I'm even more excited about the e-paper functionality because I read lots of books and publications on my Kindle or Tolino. So much less distraction and no glaring lights.
I mean, the cool thing about doing this all in Nostr events is gonna be sharing the annotations and highlights and stuff. And all of the AI navigation nostr:nprofile1qydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpr3mhxue69uhhg6r9vd5hgctyv4kzumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtcpzemhxue69uhkyetkduhxummnw3erztnrdakj7qgwwaehxw309askgun99eeh2tcpz4mhxue69uhkycnz9eekzmn5daejumr0dshsz9mhwden5te0vf5hgcm0d9hx2u3wwdhkx6tpdshszxnhwden5te0v9j82mr59ccnsurvw4ejuum0vd5kzmp0qyvhwumn8ghj7ct99ec82unsd3jhyetvv9ujucm0d5hsz8thwden5te0vfshxetywphhgct5duhxummnw3erztnrdakj7qpqm3xdppkd0njmrqe2ma8a6ys39zvgp5k8u22mev8xsnqp4nh80srqhundln is building.
You have to remember, also, that the books you see on Alexandria are all a bunch of different events, rendered in order.
So, the Bible will be split down into books, chapters, and verses, and all 30k+ verses will be a different event, so that people can refer to them, or annotate/comment on them, individually.
So, when you're looking at this edition of Jane Eyre, for instance, that is a different for every chapter. It just renders as one document. That can be read online or offline.
Accessing content this way is just so much better.
Yeah, and the performance is about to get a major boost, with the new parser and some smoother rendering and caching.
The key is to make leaving it on-Nostr so useful, that people can't be bothered exporting to other formats. Because then you end up with one, static document stored where-the-heck-evah. Dead papers. Totally goes against the idea of a scientific paper, as those are supposed to fuel discourse and imitations and connections. Papers need to be alive.
Another thing Nostr brings is WORA (write once, read anywhere). You publish your paper to Nostr and it immediately shows up in every client that handles that event type.
That's completely different to a static document file, where you have to apply to this or that committee or website, and then send them the document or whatnot.
Everything automatically ripples out to the relays and clients, on Nostr. And, if you update the document, that update also ripples out. We have a relay that will do versioning of changes, too, which is cool.
You folks are working on a ton of great stuff. This is the future I want to see.
But it's a Nerd Future, not an Influencer Future, so it's hard to get any publicity, on here, but oh well.
It will get built and be used, even if only people who can #NameTenBooks can be bothered to look at it.
There are actually a lot of nerds, out there. Nerds are a huge market. π€£
Agreed. Basically any academic I interact with has at one time or another complained about the issues with the current paradigm for disseminating scientific work. I'm not talking about politically charged research, just genuine scientists in apolitical fields trying to push the boundaries of knowledge.
Content through nostr is the kind of thing they subconsciously know they need but they just haven't seen the potential for nostr yet.
If we build it, they will come.
I really hope so. I'll be doing my part.
A big drag on this evolution will likely come from the parasitic science publishing industry, but probably also from funding agencies, and even the researchers themselves to an extent. The publishing monopoloy gets fat margins for doing essentially nothing aside from hosting. They do none of the research/validation/peer review/advocating. Funding agencies will complain that they don't have any other way to decide which research to fund because they rely so heavily on manufactured metrics by the publishing industry. Academics might be reluctant to change when their careers are on the line.
Surely you've thought about these issues before, so I'm curious to hear what you think.
Yeah, that's why this only works on Nostr. Every person can publish to the relays and they're done. They don't need to host anything or etc. since they're using the same infrastucture used to post cute cat pics and Bitcoin memes.
And you can publish from an anon npub over Tor, you know. Nobody can tell who did that.
Also, Nostr brings the potential to create other, more modern quality measures, through curation, annotation, remixing, AI, and WoT.
Also, Nostr adds the public discussion. This is really important.
Would you rather have some paper, buried 20 pages in, to a journal hardly anyone reads, or have your paper trending on social media and getting you invites to podcasts and etc.? There's a reason, why so many scientists are on social media. Be seen, engage, get mentioned, or your work is irrelevant to the wider discussion.
Trending/not trending is not really relevant for me since the impact of research can take years/decades to pop off. Yoshua Bengio is a great example of this. Nobody cared about all the fundamental ML algorithms he was coming up with in the 1990s/2000s until deep learning took off in early 2010s and those old publications were suddenly getting cited thousands of times a year.
The transparency and openess that comes with searchability and possibility for public discussion are much more interesting to me. They go hand-in-hand.
Well, academia was practically a village, back then.
I didnt know about Alexandria either. Sounds brilliant. Where can I find the code for Alexandria clients / relays and converters (assuming its all OSS)? And is there a guide on how to convert a document starting from, say, Markdown or AsciiDoc?
I convert with my own parser (which is too ugly to share π ), but there's standard converters like Pandoc.
Thanks for the info! Now I have a good excuse to explore GitCitadel as well.
Just to make sure I understand the second sentence, by "there's Pandoc", you mean using it to generate the AsciiDoc contents for each individual kind 30041 content "section" correct? (If I got this right from this link.)
What I was trying to ask is whether there's a tool that, given an entire Markdown or AsciiDoc document (possibly with some metadata comments), it generates both the publication index and content events for me. Or is Alexandria's UI the best way to handle this for now? (Hopefully, my question makes more sense now,sorry if it was unclear!)
Also, one more question if you donβt mind. Is there a group where people are discussi Alexandria, especially its more technical aspects?
Well, we have a Slack for the project team but nothing on Nostr, yet. It hasn't really interested anyone else, so far.
Got it. I'm not sure if you wish to open it to other curious devs. If you do feel free to DM me an invite to the Slack Workspace. I'm interested for sure :).
It's an implementation-focused Slack, not generalized for all 30040 clients.
Best thing is to DM nostr:nprofile1qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcpzemhxue69uhkummnw3ex2mrfw3jhxtn0wfnj7qgswaehxw309asjumn0wvhxcmmv9uq37amnwvaz7tmpw3kxzuewdehhxarj9ekxzmny9a5kuan0d93k2ucprpmhxue69uhkzapwdehhxarjwahhy6mn9e3k7mf0qyt8wumn8ghj7ct4w35zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz9mhxue69uhnzdps9enrw73wd9hj7qghwaehxw309ashgmrpwvhxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgwwaehxw309askgun99eeh2tcpzdmhxue69uhky6t5wd6xzcmt9eshqup0qqs8qy3p9qnnhhq847d7wujl5hztcr7pg6rxhmpc63pkphztcmxp3wgs75pj7 . He's the product owner, so that's up to him. He's always interested in more devs, if you want to work on the Alex project, specifically. π
Pandoc is a converter that can transpose a file from Markdown to Asciidoc.
This is my CLI for uploading test data, but the Alexandria "New Note" menu item should be opening, soon. Took it down because we're revamping the parser.
Almost any relay can handle the events. Our web client is community-based, and it displays the community relay only, unless you login (then you can see everything from your inboxes).
Oh IDK, I think this could hit a much broader audience... To me this fits in pretty well with projects like Bookdown, which is a way of creating open-source documents for publication using R notebooks. This is a way towards "reproducible research" in the sense that data analysis methods and calculations can be embedded directly (hidden) into the final document that gets published.
The "atomization" part of this is very similar to what's used in constructing both R and (the more popular) Jupyter notebook, where each "code chunk" can be separated in a similar way that separate verses / paragraphs are, as you previously mentioned.
But yeah as I write this... still Nerd stuff π
First you think about the regular text search capabilities that already exist on nostr - that's already a massive plus over navigating papers. But then you add in vector embeddings for semantic search and we're in a new world of untapped potential...
This seems ideal for something like The Network State, which is published online in a similar kind of "chunked" way, but also as a live document that gets periodically updated...
Anyway I wasn't really aware of Alexandria, really cool project! You should put more on the "about" page, because it wasn't immediately clear from all of the features you're describing... particularly the "content atomization" aspect of it.
Yeah, the About page needs to be revamped. I'm waiting for the Table of Contents and search and LLM features to go live, so that I can make pretty, new screen shots. π
We can export easily to ePUB, too, but the e-paper native app will be cooler because then you don't lose all of the Nostr features.
But we have to start someplace and ePUB is easy because Asciidoctor already comes with that. ePUB, LaTeX, and Asciimath.
I think people wonder why we're going through all of this trouble, instead of just adding zaps to a PDF viewer, but... it's already got some awesome capabilities and we haven't even finished v0.1.0, yet.
I hear that. Hard to imagine something more than a PDF when we've had 500+ years of printing press bias and influence from incumbents on how users can/should interact with content. In my own field of work, the scienctific publishing monopoly is especially guilty of this.
Yeah. That's why the first edition of #Alexandria is called "Gutenberg". We want to reimagine the printing press.
A PDF is essentially just Postscript images of pages of paper, and publications haven't moved much beyond that. This is something fundamentally different, that can be displayed _as if it were_ a PDF.
But it's designed to be navigated and produced by human and machine curators. That's why NIP-62 is called "Curated Publications", not "books". It looks like a book, but it's high-tech under the hood.
Still amazing. If it's working on that end then I'm looking forward to seeing the final result.
I didnβt know it was even existing π
Thereβs so much dev in nostr .. hard to follow
We don't get much press or money, but we have so many npubs actively working on the project, now, that our just talking about it in public can trend.
First Iβve read of this. Where?
...how do I find these free books you speak of
https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/publication?d=dracula-by-bram-stoker-v-1
https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/publication?d=21-lessons-by-der-gigi-v-1
This one takes a couple seconds to load, of course. We're revamping the parser from Typescript to Rust, to get a performance boost, but it's not rolled-out, yet. First Five Books of Moses.
https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/publication?d=the-pentateuch-by-cambridge-v-king-james-version
I would really like to check this out further. I really love my kindle but hate the centralization. Is this Project Alexandria?
Yes, and I'm all in on making a nostr based compostable document system. Currently almost finished with an auth flow to make postman and old/low spec ePaper browsers work with private/paid document relays.
Yeah, it's humming along.
We're putting all the books onto relays and then people can read them over websockets, or from any device that has http.
Need HTTP for e-paper because they can't use websockets, so Mleku has been finaggling that onto his Realy relay.
The only thing that works with e-paper, so far is Njump because it's static pages. Which is annoying, for chatting, but fine for something that rarely changes, like a book or research papers.
If you have an e-paper reader, then you can read these on it, for example. The first is Markdown (long-form article), the second is Asciidoc (Wiki page).
Just open the browser on the reader. You'll have to email yourself the hyperlink, or something, tho. π
With Alexandria, you'll have the advantage of typable links and a search bar and stuff like that.
i have to lol at the autocorrect rewriting my words to "compostable" lol, no, "composable" lol what the fuck google
anyway, i'm going slow on this stuff currently, by my standards
i wish i could just stop doing the fiat mining and focus on this because it takes me quite some time to recontextualie on both tasks and i frankly hate the shitcoin gaming project
the people i work with are decent tho
I've been really underwhelmed at the "go fast" development, I've seen on here.
Sometimes, the best way to build is to just go to sleep and work on it two days later.
Also, impossible to coordinate such a big team, if you just hack ahead, at record speed. Especially, since we're in different time zones.
The need to work really fast is condemning Nostr devs to be permanent Lone Wolves.
well, i'm dedicated to making the actual decentralised business use case with nostr happen
and i'm very responsive to the specifications of what that entails, and probably i could say that some of the reason why i'm going a bit slow is because people literally don't seem to get it and they are running off ahead to chase after some new rainbow far beyond the horizon
and i think this is a really big problem for nostr, but it's not just nostr, the whole society is losing its bearings
my fiat mine gig is ok, i'm going to deliver what they need and they are getting good consultation about what is practical, but really, the entire "crypto" scene is completely off the map also, this whole AI shit meanwhile almost nobody hardly can even understand
like, i literally today asked the middleware/smart contract dev for a simple thing - to have their database contain a simple field that tells me the newest update of a whole user's profile data, just the newest of all of the pieces
it was like, "omg i can't understand why you need to have a replica of the data" and i tried to explain to them that to do an analysis of the entire userbase comparing them all to each other is an (N-1)N number of operations, it's like, gah, do you know what a "square" is, you know, in mathematics?
yeah, that's the slope of the incline towards the hell we are at, at this moment, literally people think you can't have a distributed system without even two copies of a database
...
really? they think that the replication probem is solved?
:cry:
We're actually building really fast. It just doesn't seem like it because the project is so gigantic and covers n interfaces, clients, protocols, relays, servers, programming languages, etc.
#Alexandria is the biggest Nostr project, by far, both in team size and scope and possible use cases. With the smallest budget. π«£
Just hard to get the people holding the big pots of money to care, so we're sort of stuck passing around the hat. π We aren't really putting more focus on funding until after Gutenberg, tho. Need the MVP and the PoCs, to really sell it. It's still too abstract. We try to explain what we're building and everyone is just like, Why don't you just add zaps to PDFs? π€
yeah, i literally have downgraded my fiat gig to half time because i know this is important and i know that it's going nowhere unless we focus on the key things needed to implement
and i totally feel like i'm drowning in it even still
i don't think anyone is running my relay apart from me at this point, or they sure aren't telling me
and those who are using it are saying ... what did you say nostr:nprofile1qydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpxamhxue69uhkzer0wf5kuemrv9exg6twv9krztnvde3xjarn9e3k7mf0dehhxarjwfjkccte9a6x2um594ex2mrp0yq3zamnwvaz7tmzdahkwetj9ec8yme0qy2hwumn8ghj7cnzvgh8xctww3hhxtnvdakz7qggwaehxw309uhz7qpql5sga6xg72phsz5422ykujprejwud075ggrr3z2hwyrfgr7eylqsgexrsx "fastest relay"?
would be nice if some more people would poke it and see. because i am pretty sure it is the fastest. codec is almost 2x faster and the database is atleast 5x faster than any other relay on nostr
Yeah, it's definitely the fastest one. Great for uploading books.
So having learned more about this -- doesn't this rely on relays pretty significantly to host book parts "in perpetuity"? I mean I guess this is a broader question for #nostr in general, that if the network achieves any kind of scale, relay storage needs are going to blow up?
Not really, since events are atomic and can be downloaded and stored on any computerized device running a relay-websocket or relay-API (RESTful).
It's widely-distributed storage, but the storage doesn't need to be very redundant. There are already thousands of relays, all over the globe. You can spread the publications out. You don't need to have each publication on every relay, you just need each one on several relays, as clients can crawl Nostr and find them, wherever you put them. Even if that's just your laptop running a webserver.
Nostr actually solves the Big Data storage problem.
(your lightning address doesn't work, not sure if you know)
Try here. Lightning node is online. Amethyst is just wonky about zapping.
This sounds neet. I want to host an independent online bookstore. Will read.
How exactly do you check it out????
Is there a way to search for books?
Didnβt know this existed until now? Whoβs your head of marketing! π
Me, unfortunately. π
I'm the only project team member who has more than like 1000 followers. But my stuff rarely gets boosted or quoted, so it doesn't have much reach.
Itβs kind of weird that you mention it but donβt tell us how to access it π€
What if we never heard of it before now? π
Really? π
nostr:npub1q6ya7kz84rfnw6yjmg5kyttuplwpauv43a9ug3cajztx4g0v48eqhtt3sh is on the project team.
What does that mean?
It means that I talk about it all the time so it's surprising that anyone that interacts with me hasn't heard about it, at least once.
Guess I missed that
Sue me?
No, but that's the weird thing. I also talk about it, constantly, but there are people who follow me and interact with me regularly, who haven't heard of it. Just like they don't know that I own Bitcoin.
Nostr has this weird black hole of information, somehow. Anything significant just gets drowned in the general chatter.
Sorry, my reply was to nostr:npub1q6ya7kz84rfnw6yjmg5kyttuplwpauv43a9ug3cajztx4g0v48eqhtt3sh
This thread blew up.
If you are at all interested in "other stuff," you must read through.
nostr:nprofile1qqsggm4l0xs23qfjwnkfwf6fqcs66s3lz637gaxhl4nwd2vtle8rnfqprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qfqwaehxw309ahx7um5wghx26tww4hxg7nhv9h856t89eehqctrv5hsz8rhwden5te0w35x2cmfw3skgetv9ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hsjmvd7t *is* changing the world as we know it. We *are* going to succeed in making Nostr the de facto standard for publishing and collaboration anything of note (pun intended).
#otherstuff #nostrability #buildthefuture #beexcellent #alexandria #gitcitadel #library #publishing #books #bookstr #reading #ereader #scientific #papers #writing
What problem is this solving that is already not solved by Kindle ? beyond the benefits that #nostr offers as a #protocol - like single sign on , data operability across apps etc . ..
I think that won't really become apparent until the second minor version, when we integrate the other event types, like highlights, and the composition and remixing features. π€
And, of course, storing the events on (local) relays.
Kindle has highlights and notes .. which operate across reader , and apps on Android or iOS .. also dictionary ..
Yes, but that all runs on the Kindle infrastructure, with their proprietary MOBI format.
And they're all functions external to the book document, and you can't easily effect which entries you see.
Dumb request? Add something like ai that will help me read and understand the text deeper.
I want a βkindleβ to read it to me, or better yet just download it to my brain like a zap.
The integrated LLM is coming, yes.
It's actually stuck in a PR, at the moment. Longest PR ever. π
What is PR? for the normies⦠asking for a friend.
Pull request. When a dev wants to change the code and asks for a review, and then the rest of the devs send him packing with 2 weeks of dev eork on a honey-do list.
Got it.
generally never gets merged if you aren't part of the in-group running the repo
Donβt you just hate asking for permission all the time?
Maybe one day we will go out there and do whatever the hell we want.
that's what i do, and have done lol
i hate it because if someone made PRs for my stuff i'd have a long chat about it with them if there was issues and i would try to meet them at the middle about differences of opinion
but that's usually not the mindset of people building software on some kind of a pseudo-tenure basis, which an awful lot of the more important bitcoin and nostr repos are
or, they are just so awful i couldn't even begin to help fix it because the abomination that it is just reflects too much on their mindset
This process would give me anxiety being on both ends of this.
Sure .. but users don't care if it is Mobi or Markdown or Asci .. they want good content ..easily available, and a nice device to read in a flight or on the beach ..
If we are planning to take on Amazon .. we need something really super creative .. beyond mere riding the cottails of the protocol .. and it may not just be money .. users are always kind to try new things if they feel devs are actually trying to solve a problem .. and they have an uncanny ability to feel value :-)
Othereise development is just an academic exercise .. which is not bad ..cuz it helps devs understand the protocol .. but expectations should be set up accordingly.. means - it is a good exercise for you as dev and me as a tester .. other than that ..no one would use it .. much π
Thatβs the thing. This library can be traversed from book to book, to a comment thread, to wiki, to the next book, a magazine article and beyond eventually on any device that has at least sporadic access to the internet and a browser or a reader. Itβs not even in the same universe.
I see .. so you are scrambling the whole library .. not a specific book ??
What is the point ? I mean what is my usecase ?
I can ask any AI to tell me any part of public domain book - and translate it or summarise it .. and then share on social ..
Here is chapter 3 of Tom Sawyer summarised by Google #Gemini - is Alexendria trying to similar thing ?
Chapter 3 of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is a lively one, filled with Tom's characteristic mix of mischief, play, and budding romance. Here's a summary of the key events:
* Freedom and Revenge:
* Having successfully tricked his friends into whitewashing the fence, Tom is free to play. He promptly takes his revenge on Sid by throwing dirt clods at him.
* He then engages in a mock battle with other boys in the town square, acting as a general.
* A New Infatuation:
* Tom spots a new girl in Jeff Thatcher's garden and is immediately smitten. He tries to impress her with his antics. This girl is Becky Thatcher.
* Aunt Polly's Injustice:
* At supper, Sid accidentally breaks the sugar bowl, but Aunt Polly mistakenly blames and punishes Tom.
* Aunt polly then feels bad about it, but does not want to ruin his disipline.
* This leads to Tom feeling sorry for himself.
In essence, the chapter showcases Tom's ability to manipulate situations to his advantage, his impulsive nature, and the beginning of his romantic interest in Becky Thatcher.
Yeah, we have that, but we assume that someone might also want to actually read Tom Sawyer, and not just AI summaries.
I doubt people who just want to read AI-produced texts are part of our target audience.
Academia and intelligensia. Theologie, philosophy, natural sciences, analysis, etc.
Also, the community library aspect. And you really own the books. They're in your physical possession and cannot be censored.
Also, you use Alexandria to write and compose the books/papers, not just to read them.
Can you share bit more on the last point .. use Alexandria to write and compose .. cuz I think that is the problem space .. Amazon and likes , have nailed to distrution and consumption space , but writer has just too many problems - writing , getting instant reviews - chapter by chapter , collaboration to write on related topics , getting paid , distribution of their work to all the platforms in a single automated workflow ..
I am sure , you have has real world book writers on your team who can share their problems ..
Yes, they give us good pointers. Like, you use summaries to skip reading books, but writers want them for the info blurb on the cover. Tedious to write that.
Alexandria is organized as the inverse of a Kindle book. Instead of having one big document, that you can interact with through linking to parts of the text, it's a bunch of smaller blocks that can be displayed or exported as a big document. And you can't take one section out of a Kindle book and embed it (along with the link to the original author profile data, such as lightning wallet information) within another book. You can only copy-paste the text or create a link. Only Nostr events can be truly embedded because only they are truly atomic.
It's similar to the difference between a hyperlink (reference to a different web page), and literally copying part of the HTML out of a web page and inserting it into a new webpage, but more absolute, since the inserted HTML stays a separate document and you still have the ability to click on that HTML and open up the originally-containing page. Or to say, "Show me all other pages that contain this page-section. Show me all similar page-sections. Show me all citations of this page section. Show me other page-sections by the author of this page..."
And, don't forget, unlike a hyperlink to the original document, you can link to your own local copy of that document. That means that they can't rug you, by changing the document after-the-fact, as you can archive all of your references and your atomic copy is an absolutely verifiable and signed edition.
That's why I said it's like the Internet Archive, but distributed and uncensorable, and you can take it local. You can keep the content of the references important to the books you read right on your phone, and secure them. You could tell Alexandria to download the book, research paper and wiki page, and all references n layers out, and then pull that and secure the data.
So, that's why the next minor version is where you'll finally see the point of all of this data structure design. When you'll see, why we didn't just add zaps to ePUBs and PDFs.
More importantly what is the commercial model - how is it benefiting the writer .. Amazon offeres 45 cents per page turn .. and a good part of the sales .. and heavily subsidized eInk - kindle - for the readers
I own nothing with Kindle and they know about everything I read.
I want to own what I read and not be surveilled.
Just like old time books, but digital. There was a fleeting time when this was the case, but not really anymore.
Thatβs the problem that is being solved.
All public domain books are available in project gutenberg .. you can download and read without having share anything
Yup, I should have mentioned that I use that site.
You can actually send them to your Kindle and read offline ..
Yeah, that's where we're getting a lot of the books and audiobooks.
The classics.
That is great ..but all #AI chatbots already scavenged them .. I am not sure what is value add in putting these old books on #nostr unless #Alexandria is #nostr #AI for books !
And that they are already a click away on archives open library..https://openlibrary.org/
Wow .. didn't know they have 47 million unique visitors .. might as well enable open library with #nostr log in ..
Yes, go do that.
This comment just tells me that you don't get the value proposition of Nostr, itself. You keep pointing to websites, PDF collections, chatbots that serve up what they think might be original sources... these are not equivalents for Nostr events.
Will there be Audiobooks?
I love books, but I can never find the time to sit down and read an ebook.
Very cool technology though. Keep up the great work.
Yes, of course.
Are audiobooks available now, or is this an upcoming feature to look out for?
I'm assuming you mean, if it will do read-alouds of the text. That is actually already a Nostr DVM that you can use on any note, and not something we'd have to invent.
But, something I thought would be cute, early-on, was publications that are meant to be audio-first or video-first, like this:
As long as the read alouds sound human realistic. That sounds awesome to me!
I am a big fan of librivox books. I have a lot in my collection. Call of the Wild by Jack London is one of my favorites from there. The key is to sift through all their content to find books with 1 consistent good voiceover recording artist. which can be challenging. Many of the books over there have poor audio quality and bad readers which makes you turn off a great book before you even get started.
Probably doubly hurts for me coming from a professional audio, video, and writer background. lol
The more and more I am learning about this project the more tempted I am to contribute in some way. Just not sure where and if I could fit in. Not mister money bucks over here at the moment and my Dev skills are still developing.
There's a nice one with nostr:nprofile1qyfhwumn8ghj7ctvvahjuat50phjummwv5q32amnwvaz7tm9v3jkutnwdaehgu3wd3skueqqyzu7we2xhgry2mknq8v7227yn7jguu9xhu3g90n6rtnjj3mpyq3ackdvvhl that nostr:nprofile1qyxhwumn8ghj7e3h0ghxjme0qyd8wumn8ghj7urewfsk66ty9enxjct5dfskvtnrdakj7qpql2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqta478g was demoing, a while back.
We've got a bug hunt planned, probably end of this month. Just jump in, when you see me posting about it.
Where is it?!
https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/
Example of some publications you might find interesting:
https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/publication?d=the-pentateuch-by-cambridge-v-king-james-version
First time I heard of it, will def check it out!
Check out this cool book project on Nostr!
