Show HN: Public domain classics delivered as weekly email installments

[pipnonsense]

In 2020 I posted this, "Show HN: Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752

It got front page for a few hours. I posted in the anniversary of when The Count of Monte Cristo first started to be published in serialized form. To celebrate it, I created a website called "Serial Literature" that allowed you to subscribe and read the book in a similar way, serialized, but in your email. I also added another famous work that was initially published serialized, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I later added about other 100 books to be read the same way (not all of them originally serialized).

I never posted about it anywhere else (maybe flopped on Reddit, I don't remember), but it got a lot of engaged subscribers. It never grew over that initial HN burst (I never advertised it again), but it got about 1,000 subscribers and, years later, a few dozens of those were still reading some book through Serial Literature.

That was until... a startup failed and my web app wouldn't work anymore.

At the time, I wanted to build something serverless and learn some new tech. I chose FaunaDB, learned their proprietary query language (FQL), actually enjoyed it a lot, and built the site with it. It was pretty neat and worked fine. But then, 5 years later, around June last year, their service stopped working (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414742). As it was serverless, the DB was also on their cloud, hosted by the failed startup, in a proprietary format. One day, Serial Literature stopped working overnight. I downloaded the data, but in their weird format, it was not very helpful.

I got a bunch of emails in the last months asking about it, people wanting to continue reading more through their email, where I explained what happened and promised it would come back in some form. This site I am showing now, Confabulists, is the come back.

I am a writer myself, indie, self-published, science fiction writer, and I missed a newsletter/blog platform more adequate for fiction writers, so I built one myself. And, yesterday, I finally completed bringing all those public domain books in English to Confabulists and now I am able to offer that same service of Serial Literature, again, still for free.

I hope this reaches everyone that loved Serial Literature, but just accepted it was gone and never contacted me (the ones who contacted me I am replying back telling them about Confabulists).

Thanks HN!

[cranberryturkey]

The FaunaDB cautionary tale really resonates. Proprietary query languages and vendor lock-in are exactly the kind of invisible risk that doesn't feel real until it's too late. Glad you rebuilt it.

The serialized delivery angle is clever — there's something psychologically different about receiving a chapter at a time vs having the whole book available. It creates anticipation the way the original newspaper serializations did.

Curious about your stack this time around. Did you go with something more portable for the database layer? After getting burned once, I imagine data portability was high on the list.

[pipnonsense]

Sorry for the late reply, hope you still see this.

Yes, I went with Postgres to be safe. I am still serverless, but now there is Vercel doing a good job for serverless DB. They integrate with Neon, which makes Postgres serverless possible.

More things are into Vercel as well, as the cron jobs, which I used to use AWS only for that. Much easier now in configuration by code through Vercel.

Anything goes wrong with Vercel or Neon and I can just export my whole DB and go for a regular server anywhere.