What is the point ? I mean what is my usecase ?
Discussion
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.