Comment by titanomachy

4 hours ago

Thank you for this. I sorted the "technology" and "science" sections and saw a few excellent books that I've read and a few that I would really like to read. This motivates me to start setting aside "reading time" again every day, since I've lost that habit.

The recent "society & culture" books gave me some good book club ideas.

Bug report: filtering by "award" appears to be broken for some awards. If I select Pulitzer or National Book Award, no books show up, but I can find books with these awards by browsing.

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titanomachy

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joeguilmette  2 hours ago

I recently did this! I fixed my phone habit and my TV habit, and I just read no, the family has silent reading parties instead of movie night.

Here’s what I did: 1. Install Jomo on the phone. There are other apps, but basically it makes me wait 5s before I can open a brainrot app, and then I can only use it for 5min, and every time I do this I have to wait an additional 5s. It resets at midnight. This introduces the necessary friction.

2. Paper books. The house is now full of paper books. Book seems interesting? Buy it. Books everywhere. Real books.

3. The actual habit. I stack habits. Right now I have a daily workout routine. First thing I leave the house and either run or go to the gym. I bring my book, and afterwards go to the cafe across the street for a coffee. At night, I read before going to bed. Once you finish a few books this way, you’re in. TV now is actually hard to pay attention to, and I feel kind of… dirty doomscrolling now (like eating junk food, it tastes good but you feel gross during the experience).

If you want something to start with: https://bookshop.org/p/books/true-grit-charles-portis/5ac454...

  • marcus_holmes  2 hours ago

    I bought a tiny e-reader [0] and carry that as well as my phone. When the temptation to doomscroll triggers, I pull out the e-reader instead and read a book.

    I tried attaching the book to the phone as their marketing suggests, but that didn't click somehow. Having both out means I would check the phone and then not look at the book.

    Working so far, but it's only been a couple of weeks, so let's see.

    [0] after reading this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662381

benbreen  4 hours ago

Awesome, that's what I was going for. I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category browsing. Glad to see it out in the world hopefully doing the same thing!

  • titanomachy  4 hours ago

    One thing that would make this information even more useful and searchable would be a JSON dump of your dataset. You could serve it statically on S3 or similar, to keep hosting costs to a minimum.

    Of course, having created a cool thing generates no obligation for further work on your part! I'm grateful that you did this work and made it available for free.

    Did you build your semantic search index based on the full text of the books, or just the reviews and descriptions?