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blockwriter | 1 year ago

I’m a little bit embarrassed to share it at this point, but I’m developing an application, called Biblish, that is meant to offer small utilities that augment the process of reading, writing, publishing, and distributing literature. One piece of that is a note taking software, called Papertrail, that allows you to take notes for books you are reading in print, and other users can subscribe to these notes and see them on a page by page basis as they read the book themselves.

https://papertrail.biblish.com

I am a writer of literary fiction first and foremost, and I never really understood the interest in tracking or reviewing books. I can see its usefulness for a certain segment of the market, but what I come to read is mostly the result of following the map of influences of the authors who inspire my writing. The quality of these works is thoroughly vetted by their centuries of survival. Little reviews do not seem like a useful mechanism for finding the best in contemporary literature either.

In any event, little reviews and social features are a much better way to develop a user base for your platform. Papertrail works fairly well as intended, and I use it extensively, but we found pretty early on that asking users to take extensive notes on books was too large a barrier of entry for people to cross and start producing the content the site needs to grow. My lead developer, who really functioned, perhaps a little too well, as cofounder, found a good job opportunity elsewhere, and I have not been able to replace him. Me and another developer are still working on it, but it looks to be on the road of another application that did not quite find a market.

My profile on Papertrail can be found below.

https://papertrail.biblish.com/russell

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