nupub

A reading experience as if the internet happened. NuPub is a social network for exploring, remixing, and generating ideas - it's like Pinterest for book excerpts and concept creation.

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Inspiration

Why are books so far removed from discussion and further intellectual development? The author is only the first domino in any intellectual revolution, it is her readers who develop a shared understanding of the books core idea, embed its teachings in their personal library of mental models, and extend its life beyond the pages of a book. We want to accelerate this process by bringing source text closer to online discussion and concept generation. Are.na does this really well with many kinds of web content, but not text.

What it does

NuPub allows readers to curate book excerpts (blocks) around a theme of their choosing in a channel. Channels are curations of book excerpts that should all be roughly similar along some dimension.

How we built it

We spent some time doing a Figma mock up. Then we started building it. It uses a Firbase Graph database, and a react front end.

Challenges we ran into

Graph databases are hard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

IT WORKS and user and content creation scales

What we learned

The type of database we used (firebase) wasn't ideal for the amount of relations that we have which required a lot of manual management on the developer side

What's next for nupub

Do some more styling. Implement following, commenting, private channels,

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