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I built this service to help deal with this problem: https://omreader.co https://omreader.co It allows you to read blogs (RSS feeds) and email newsletters on y

I built this service to help deal with this problem: https://omreader.co https://omreader.co It allows you to read blogs (RSS feeds) and email newsletters on your Kindle. I originally started working on this to help me read financial news without needing my phone which I find to be a really distracting environment. I would find myself mindlessly opening up and scrolling through reddit or HN and in my experience, repeatedly doing that has a tendency to destroy ones ability to concentrate. It's super nice to be able to wake up without your phone near you and still be able to read long form content. I just launched it out of beta but any feedback would be great. Edit: HN is currently hugging the database to death. The site is still working fine but I apologize for any slowness. I will upgrade the database tonight.

staticvoidmaine 6y ago
This is very cool! I’ve recently started using my wife’s old Kindle for reading the pfSense book and the Google SRE Handbook and have been loving the fact that it isn’t a bright screen or filled with distractions. This is a great idea that I’ll be trying out with a couple technical blogs.
- omreaderhn 6y ago
  Awesome! Yeah I tested this out on my mom's old kindle (one with a keyboard) and it renders really well. Not the same as how it looks on the newer Kindles but they still have special support for the newspaper format on the old Kindles and it looks great.
corytheboyd 6y ago
I love the idea, will have to try it out. Not so thrilled about yet another service that wants to collect a monthly rent, but maybe the free tier will suite my needs
- omreaderhn 6y ago
  Ha no worries. I've tried to find a good balance with the free tier. It's actually a bit more generous than what the copy on the marketing site says so I'll go ahead and update that today. Would love to hear any feedback that you have.
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    Love it :) Will try to remember to report back here when I get around to it!
  - contactlight11 6y ago
    I will be trying this out later! One of the first thoughts I had was creating a middle tier, you have a big gap between what the free tier and $8 tier offers. Assuming it works well for me, I could see myself going for something in the $1.99-$3.99 range that offers 5-10 newspapers, 1 delivery per day, 10-20 articles/delivery, etc. Congrats on receiving the HN hug of death!
    - omreaderhn 6y ago
      Perfect, thank you. This is really good feedback. I am still very much in the early stages of figuring out a pricing model.
darrmit 6y ago
This is something I never even considered but I love the idea of leaning more on my Kindle Paperwhite and less on my iPad. Going to give it a shot!
nickcw 6y ago
Love the service - I've just signed up to give it a go. I also use the "send to kindle" chrome extension which takes the web page page you are looking at and sends it to your kindle. I find it really useful for long reads I need to pay attention to and I like having a queue of them on my kindle.
- omreaderhn 6y ago
  Thanks! Yeah I've used that extension. If anyone's curious here's the official Amazon one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for-google/cgdjpilhipecahhcilnafpblkieebhea?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for...
  - marvindanig 6y ago
    I tried using Kindle this way earlier… but it only worsened for me. :-( I think the issue is with scrolling itself. Scrolling erodes the attention span because it kinda goes against the grain of saccadic perception. As opposed to that a page turn on a physical book transitions to the next page and stays there in a state of rest until we have comfortably absorbed all of the content on page and are ready to move on to next.
cik 6y ago
This looks amazing - and for folks like me with a Kobo, it instantly lead me to https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader.
treebornfrog 6y ago
Amazing.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Don't apologize. Feel proud to have built something that people find so useful to bring your servers down. Good users know that you deserve a little patience.
- omreaderhn 6y ago
  That's very kind of you. Thank you!
ciarannolan 6y ago
How do you actually build the Kindle file with the articles? I've tried a couple times to hack together something similar for personal use but I could never figure out how to create the newspaper file.
foofoo4u 6y ago
This looks terrific. It seems to be exactly the service I have been looking for. I too found myself easily distracted and addicted to my phone when browsing the news. To help combat my addiction, I wrote a script that'll parse my favorite news websites and email them to my Kindle. It's been "life transforming". I can now read my news addiction and distraction free. Plus, I have always preferred reading walls of text on an e-ink display, especially before going to bed. The only downside of my approach is that it takes a lot of time to write my scripts. Every website is different and some websites don't provide APIs. For example, the WSJ provides no APIs to consume their content even as a paying member. So I find myself resorting to selenium to do the parsing work for me. There are many other websites and blogs that I'd like to have sent to my kindle, but I dread the effort needing to do that. So I'd happily pay a small fee, such as your site, to have this work done for me.
- omreaderhn 6y ago
  Yeah you've touched upon one of the key value adds I think. I've put a lot of work into trying to support as many sites as possible. There are multiple processing stages and fallback paths that are used to ensure that the article is parsed correctly. It's an ongoing challenge but it seems viable as it stands currently. If you run into any issues please let me know. I'm relatively quick at improving the support for any site when I become aware of a potential for improvement.
herval 6y ago
I launched something similar in 2014 - a few years too early, I guess: https://betalist.com/startups/thedailycrunch https://betalist.com/startups/thedailycrunch Good luck with your service :) officially supporting apps on the Kindle would open up a very interesting (if niche) market - I'd love to see "the slow web" become a thing.
- omreaderhn 6y ago
  Thanks! That looks really nice. Yeah there's a surprising amount of challenges in creating a service like this that targets the Kindle. If you end up signing up, let me know and I'll add some some special access flags to your account.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  "The slow web" is already there :) It's also called "write a paper letter to a friend". It's amazing how much more satisfying reading an article can be, if you got it as a slightly crumbled paper printout mailed to you by a trusted friend, who is awaiting your thoughtful comments on it in the upcoming weeks.

staticvoidmaine 6y ago

This is very cool! I’ve recently started using my wife’s old Kindle for reading the pfSense book and the Google SRE Handbook and have been loving the fact that it isn’t a bright screen or filled with distractions. This is a great idea that I’ll be trying out with a couple technical blogs.

omreaderhn 6y ago
Awesome! Yeah I tested this out on my mom's old kindle (one with a keyboard) and it renders really well. Not the same as how it looks on the newer Kindles but they still have special support for the newspaper format on the old Kindles and it looks great.

corytheboyd 6y ago

I love the idea, will have to try it out. Not so thrilled about yet another service that wants to collect a monthly rent, but maybe the free tier will suite my needs

omreaderhn 6y ago
Ha no worries. I've tried to find a good balance with the free tier. It's actually a bit more generous than what the copy on the marketing site says so I'll go ahead and update that today. Would love to hear any feedback that you have.
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  Love it :) Will try to remember to report back here when I get around to it!
- contactlight11 6y ago
  I will be trying this out later! One of the first thoughts I had was creating a middle tier, you have a big gap between what the free tier and $8 tier offers. Assuming it works well for me, I could see myself going for something in the $1.99-$3.99 range that offers 5-10 newspapers, 1 delivery per day, 10-20 articles/delivery, etc. Congrats on receiving the HN hug of death!
  - omreaderhn 6y ago
    Perfect, thank you. This is really good feedback. I am still very much in the early stages of figuring out a pricing model.

darrmit 6y ago

This is something I never even considered but I love the idea of leaning more on my Kindle Paperwhite and less on my iPad. Going to give it a shot!

nickcw 6y ago

Love the service - I've just signed up to give it a go. I also use the "send to kindle" chrome extension which takes the web page page you are looking at and sends it to your kindle. I find it really useful for long reads I need to pay attention to and I like having a queue of them on my kindle.

omreaderhn 6y ago
Thanks! Yeah I've used that extension. If anyone's curious here's the official Amazon one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for-google/cgdjpilhipecahhcilnafpblkieebhea?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-kindle-for...
- marvindanig 6y ago
  I tried using Kindle this way earlier… but it only worsened for me. :-( I think the issue is with scrolling itself. Scrolling erodes the attention span because it kinda goes against the grain of saccadic perception. As opposed to that a page turn on a physical book transitions to the next page and stays there in a state of rest until we have comfortably absorbed all of the content on page and are ready to move on to next.

cik 6y ago

This looks amazing - and for folks like me with a Kobo, it instantly lead me to https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader.

treebornfrog 6y ago

Amazing.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Don't apologize. Feel proud to have built something that people find so useful to bring your servers down. Good users know that you deserve a little patience.

omreaderhn 6y ago
That's very kind of you. Thank you!

ciarannolan 6y ago

How do you actually build the Kindle file with the articles? I've tried a couple times to hack together something similar for personal use but I could never figure out how to create the newspaper file.

foofoo4u 6y ago

This looks terrific. It seems to be exactly the service I have been looking for. I too found myself easily distracted and addicted to my phone when browsing the news. To help combat my addiction, I wrote a script that'll parse my favorite news websites and email them to my Kindle. It's been "life transforming". I can now read my news addiction and distraction free. Plus, I have always preferred reading walls of text on an e-ink display, especially before going to bed. The only downside of my approach is that it takes a lot of time to write my scripts. Every website is different and some websites don't provide APIs. For example, the WSJ provides no APIs to consume their content even as a paying member. So I find myself resorting to selenium to do the parsing work for me. There are many other websites and blogs that I'd like to have sent to my kindle, but I dread the effort needing to do that. So I'd happily pay a small fee, such as your site, to have this work done for me.

omreaderhn 6y ago
Yeah you've touched upon one of the key value adds I think. I've put a lot of work into trying to support as many sites as possible. There are multiple processing stages and fallback paths that are used to ensure that the article is parsed correctly. It's an ongoing challenge but it seems viable as it stands currently. If you run into any issues please let me know. I'm relatively quick at improving the support for any site when I become aware of a potential for improvement.

herval 6y ago

I launched something similar in 2014 - a few years too early, I guess: https://betalist.com/startups/thedailycrunch https://betalist.com/startups/thedailycrunch Good luck with your service :) officially supporting apps on the Kindle would open up a very interesting (if niche) market - I'd love to see "the slow web" become a thing.

omreaderhn 6y ago
Thanks! That looks really nice. Yeah there's a surprising amount of challenges in creating a service like this that targets the Kindle. If you end up signing up, let me know and I'll add some some special access flags to your account.
fxtentacle 6y ago
"The slow web" is already there :) It's also called "write a paper letter to a friend". It's amazing how much more satisfying reading an article can be, if you got it as a slightly crumbled paper printout mailed to you by a trusted friend, who is awaiting your thoughtful comments on it in the upcoming weeks.