Writebook

I've respect the amount of care @jasonfried and the 37signals team puts into the products they build. I particularly appreciate that they built Writebook – would love to see more people write and share their stories, ideas, etc. That's why I applied for a job at Medium ~11 years ago. Fortunately they didn't hire me and I started Product Hunt though. :)

Looks incredible, just signed up but have a quick question: Are published writebooks indexed by search engines?

Love that this is self-hosted and giving authors the power of ownership. I can see this becoming a really cool way for companies to package their Brand Guides, Handbooks, etc. It's a bit more "official" feeling than Notion and the fact that it can live on a hosted domain is nice.

This is awesome 📖 🔥 I’m browsing from an older iPad (5th gen) that can’t upgrade to Safari 17+ so potentially millions of older Apple devices can’t render the books in the browser. Even the most updated DuckDuckGo (7.12) FireFox (127) and Chrome (323) for iOS don’t work. A compatibility feature or “detect and redirect” based on browser towards a specific landing page would be amazing 😻 The 37 Signals crew is amazing and this restriction is really due to Apple not allowing older hardware to upgrade.

When exactly does the writing begin? This is the most overblown, dreadfully packaged, poorly explained, inappropriately marketed, and not-free SaaS quasi-web3 junk non-webapp webapp I’ve ever had the misfortune to get excited about. This isn’t about writing a book? And it’s not free? And you can’t do a lot of things? Most of what this does can be done with a modern word processor, not to mention a free (actually free) graphic design website starting with the letter C. And what kind of reach-around are DigitalOcean—and was it Hatzen?—getting to be so prominently recommended? They're difficult to use, behind a paywall, and thus, not free. And why do I need a cloud system to use a glorified word processor? I am flabbergasted by the upskirt smoke-blowing going on here. As a published writer, when do I start writing? It’s been an hour. I don’t even know how to install the program yet. (Is there a program, or is this another thinly veiled web3 decentralized grab for my personal data? Except unlike web2.0, your T&C are much better written, so you can say, “well, you agreed to it.” Poor Facebook.) Writebook fails in one very obvious way that is immortalized in a quote by (I believe) Stephen King: “If you want to be a writer, start writing.” When does the writing start—at what point can I put words on a page during the installation of a genAI whosa-whatsit that takes up a lot of my computing power for what can be done for free online? Hey look, it took me one hour. I finally found someplace to write something.

This is really cool, what a great way to lower the hurdle for self-publishing! I love that you can see the page order and drag and drop how you want things. It would be great to have the ability to export in different formats. I've been considering doing a book of family history and this would be a great way to collaborate on it, but I'd like the ability to create physical book copies for family members too.

if an AI agent becomes smart enough to find this amazing tool, it might start its own goodreads.com and eventually make a producthunt launch for it..........tell me if this is too much ..haha