Would you pay to finish more long-reads every month? 📖
👋 IH
I'm working on something that helps you get through those long-reads that are super interesting but you never have time to finish.
Have had amazing early results with a small niche group (academics) and would love to get a sense of whether this would be useful in the IH community too.
Can't say too much about how it works at the moment but we're almost ready for private beta.
Just wanted to get a sense from IH of:
- Whether this is a problem you share
- Whether you'd pay to solve it
- What your gut instinct is for the monthly price-point (let's say you read an average of 5 really interesting long-reads per month that you never would have finished).
By 'long-reads' I'm talking about anything that requires a considerable amount of attention to finish, from articles to blogs to e-books etc.
Thanks in advance!
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Have you been keeping up with ReadUp? I highly recommend listening to the podcast episode where they explain how they tackled identifying worthwhile long reads by validating people actually read it (things have changed since).
Read their blog for morsels of data on their readership, and check out their Chrome extension reviews to see your audience.
There is also ML that attempts to summarize long-reads, something to keep in mind as well.
This is amazingly useful, thank you so much. Re ML - came across this the other day which looks promising: https://tldrthis.com/ but haven't seen anything that properly nails it yet.
I'm not sure from your post what a "long read" is and what the pain point you are trying to solve. At the top of the post you defined "long" as something you don't have TIME to finish, at the bottom its something that requires a considerable amount of ATTENTION to finish.
Based on either of those descriptions "long" is subjective to the reader; is "long" a book? An academic article? a colleagues dissertation? a wired blog post? Further, people struggle to finish "long" reads for a variety of reasons. The content might be too much of a time commitment (reader is too slow or content is large) or could be from a lack of reading comprehension. Especially at the academic level (academic journals are dry and I constantly have to stop and make sure I know what I just read).
For that reason I wouldn't pay anything until I knew more about what the service is.
This post needs a little more info before we can rationally say if its something we would use.
Thanks so much for this, really helpful- will edit shortly. Just to clarify for the time being: ‘long’ in this context is any bit of (digital) text that you want to read but don’t have time to read.
Depends, but more towards a 'yes'. I just don't know how a tool can motivate me to read more haha.
Thanks for your feedback! In terms of motivation...you'll just have to wait and see 😉 - we've had really positive feedback from the first batch of people to try it...78% of them said they read more than they would have. Not as high as I'd like it to be yet but I'll take that!