Kurt Vonnegut advocated for writers to throw away the first chapter of their book. He liked to drop the reader into the thick of it immediately.

Unrelated to the idea, but this website strangely blocks `Alt+←` and `Alt+→` to cycle through browser history.

Edit: It seems the website overrides the `←` and `→` arrow keys specifically, and using `event.preventDefault()` causes the problem. I think it's good practice to ignore keys with modifiers in such a situation.

Does it actually break on mobile Safari, or just desktop? Overriding arrow keys for swipe-nav makes sense on a phone, but if it's shipping the same JS bundle to both, that's the actual bug worth fixing.

It's not "blocked", the person implementing it just forgo any sort of browser history usage when creating the website/"app", and the entire thing is controlled 100% in their own JS code. I guess author only had their specific mobile use in mind when creating it? Maybe swiping for back/forward works if you view it on the phone?

When I visit a bookstore, I will look for things I recognize/want. But I also will open random books and read the first page to see if anything hooks me. I try to come away from any bookstore visit with one book I've never heard of and may have never been recommended otherwise. This is a nice recreation of that experience (sans the paper smell).

exactly my thoughts too, this is a great way to digitally recreate the bookstore experience :)

reminds me of Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" back in 2003, minus the recommendation engine. worked because friction was near zero. same deal here, just prettier UI and faster load.

I always follow the rule in the book "How to Read a Book": give the book a superficial reading to decide if it is worth reading deeply and carefully.

Would not recommend for fiction - at least not mass market fiction. But Mortimer probably felt those were not reading, and the method would work for him :-)

When I read How To Read a Book, I was quite impressed. In practice ... it's not very useful for the types of book I read. Likely better for deeper, philosophical books (including fiction of that category).

For a lot of fiction books, my rule is to read the first 50 pages. If I'm not engaged, move on. Life is short. I believe Stephen King also used that heuristic. It's fine if you miss out on some great books. You're not going to get to read all of them anyway.

50 pages in, "How to Read a Book" itself would've gotten skipped.

Sure, until deep-read pile hits 400 books and superficial pass becomes permanent state. Seen it happen to backlogs and to incident postmortems alike.

Can’t recommend the book enough, taught me a lot of tricks

Ignoring whether this is a good business, I feel like this is a pretty terrible way to judge a book. If it took off it would result in everyone just starting their book with a real hook, which only works for a small number of genres and only if nothing else needs to be setup before "hooking" (simple "nothing is unfamiliar" stories).

I've read plenty of books on recommendation that I think are great, but they were not the kind of books that could start with a hook I think.

But, the counterargument to this is if it helps people start books, then who cares if it is an effective strategy or not.

Still better than judging by the cover. Also, it is important to know that there aren't any deal breakers in the author's style.

> But, the counterargument to this is if it helps people start books, [...].

It certainly doesn't. Not that it matters to people who love reading books, for they know judging a whole book by its first page(s), or based on some formula extracted from one of those silly self-improvement tomes, is just ridiculous (especially the latter reminiscent of "Pritchard's graph" from Dead Poets Society).

I think the reveal button is counted as an upvote for the book because it supposedly discovered my taste and it was based on th books I revealed, but not bookmarked.

That makes sense. "I read some and wanted to read more" is a useful metric like an upvote (it doesn't have to mean "I know I like this" to be useful).

If that is true, it's bad design. The site definitely needs a dislike button too, while we're at it...

I don't know, I think some books like for example Frank Herbert's need a couple more pages to set up the scene.

Also, some of the best tv shows I watched need a couple episodes build up to get a nice payout.

I don't think the site is claiming otherwise.

And as for Frank Herbert's Dune, I gave it a try. I read the first two books, and was 20% of my way through the third when I realized that "No, this whole story is not going to get good ever."

Should have just stopped after a few pages of the first book :-)

It's a good thing that people have different preferences

A note for OP: the creation lake first page is an intro page that starts with "praise for creation lake" and lists a lot of author endorsements. You need to fix that

maybe it is mostly books, but the first one it served me was a /r/aita post

https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781538704448

Yeah, same for me. I was confused.

But click "Reveal". This is in fact a book.

I believe that's a fiction/in universe reddit post

The button on the homepage is hardcoded to this book, which I find extremely strange. Why not choose a random book, and why pick such a confusing quote?

Clicked the link. Selected "Literary". First sample was quite good. Vaguely caught the name of the author. Closed page. Then decided to go back. Could not find the first sample which I decided I might want to read. Got just enough of the author name to get Google to find "Colson Whitehead" when I entered "Colston". The book was "Cool Machine". Went to borrow it from Sno-Isle.org. Placed a hold on the physical book. Number 51 in the hold line (all time record for my holds -- got plenty to read until its likely availability). Glad I found this site, but on my second visit did not find any "Literary" first pages that resonated. Blind luck. Good site idea though. HTH, NSC

Spoiler alert for sequels. Happened to me with Shift (second book of the Silo trilogy).

If the book is boring after the 40th page then it's not for you.

5th page *

The world needs more delightful websites that do one clever thing well like this. Turns out I need to read Percival Everett!

This is really quite lovely. I shelved a few books. Very nicely done UX. Thanks for this.

This is basically an ad for recent books the maker likes or gets paid to promote and the selection is hot garbage

Another day, another rotten candy apple for giggling postliterates.

Ran into this building a search feature — you can't judge relevance from a snippet alone, need full context. Ended up letting users toggle between snippet and full preview, way fewer "wait this isn't what I wanted" clicks.