jazz3020

are you referring to this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831177

Thank you!

Okay, that's fair. It isn't that many, but it's still 10x more than the industry leader, Blinkist, though. A good start.

As a small company, we currently need to sacrifice the first reader's experience for the sake of spreading out the costs over time. But every subsequent read is cached!

I have mixed feelings. I generally agree—the industry tends to incentivize writers to fill a certain amount of space, much like college essays. However, there are quite a few books I've enjoyed in their entirety, discovering new insights when re-reading them.

Hmm, which book was it? I can check. It is designed to complement the original work by allowing you to preview/review books before/after reading them, not to replace the need to read the original book.

Good point! Easy fix.

Okay, I really appreciate the feedback! Agree on the "meat in the bone," quotes, and LLM-like writing style (which is somewhat intended).

On-the-fly/cache: Yeah, I agree. We're only four months old—the number of on-the-fly summaries will go down significantly over time.

85%: What could make it 100%?

Pricing: I think that's fair. But considering Blinkist charges for $100+ for yearly, the $80 lifetime deal isn't that bad.

Legal: We actually drive a decent amount of traffic to Amazon, Audible, and Kindle. We're hoping to partner with the publishers and authors in the future whether in the form of revenue sharing or licsening.

I'm sorry to break this news to you, but your attitude ruins the internet/world more. Can you point out one instance of 'full of shit' content on the site?

Yes, we try to borrow as often as possible and buy when necessary

Thank you for your kind feedback!

How would this ruin the internet?

I believe the content falls under Fair Use. More details: https://docs.sobrief.com/en/articles/9905825-is-sobrief-infr...

The most common first action people take on our site is reading a summary of a book they've already read to assess its quality themselves. I don't think they care whether it was written by OpenAI or a monkey, as long as it's good.

Oh, lol. Just fixed it!

Yeah, great point. Will add that!

> Meaning you “generated” 73k “summaries” of which you are wholly unable to verify the content of because it would require you to have read the books and listened to/read the “summaries”.

No, we generate summaries on the fly, too. Why would you generate all the summaries in advance when you can summarize real-time when a user clicks on it?

> What is with sloppybros and thinking quantity is more desirable than quality?

Have you read any of our summaries? Go ahead and read a summary of a book you've actually read and let me know what it's lacking. IMO, our summaries are way more thorough than human-written counterparts. And the structure is consistent across the entire catalog. In other words, we offer both quality and quantity.

> What motivated you to “remove” this fact from your website? Legitimate criticism?

No, just a matter of branding. We thought "AI" might add a cool factor, but everyone's AI nowadays, so we're just differentiating. Also, we didn't care to buy the ".ai" domain either. Most people already know it's AI-powered without us letting them know.

true

llm: prefer not to answer tts: open ai

we used to mention AI in the title, but we removed it. we did list it on a bunch of ai directories like future pedia which does say we use ai

EDIT: just added a help article saying that we use ai

OP here—happy to answer any questions! We’ve been working really hard since writing the first line of code 4 months ago.

Ah, that must be because of the render in the background. Maybe we should turn that off.

Oh, interesting. What browser are you using? I'm able to set to 0.

OP here. Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, those are some pretty tough sentences (obviously not in the dataset). The tongue twister one is really interesting.

OP here. The more you use, the cheaper it gets. But if you're not using much, there isn't any cost-saving benefits.

Once you scale to ~60M characters per month, it's 50% cheaper. In other words, if you're at a stage where you spend $1,000/mo on text-to-speech, you'd spend $500/mo instead.

One of the developers Eric here. Would love to get any feedback!

What's the best way for me to reach out?