[gjm11]

I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits.

But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that we feed books into an LLM instead of reading them. It looks to me more like a discovery mechanism: you run this thing, it shows you some possible links between books, and maybe you think "hmm, that little snippet seems well written" or "well, I enjoyed book X, let's give book Y a try" or whatever.

I don't think it would work particularly well for me; I'd want longer excerpts to get a sense of whether a book is interesting, and "contains a fragment that has some semantic connection with a fragment of a book I liked" doesn't feel like enough recommendation. Maybe it is indeed a huge waste of time. But if it is, it isn't because it's encouraging people to substitute LLM use for reading.

[imdsm]

commenter above probably didn't read the post, ironically

[ryan_n]

Guess we need “reading across hacker news articles with Claude code.”

[gulugawa]

The ideal way to find similarities between two books is to read both of them. If an LLM is finding links between two books, that means that the LLM read both of the books.

To determine if a book is worth reading, I think it's better to ask someone for their recommendation or look at online reviews.