Kindle has highlights and notes .. which operate across reader , and apps on Android or iOS .. also dictionary ..
Discussion
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.