ReadBeam

The release of 0.9beta worked sufficiently smooth. Since the release the traffic on the site has doubled and caused all different kinds of challenges:

• Gmail, my current email provider, locks the account from time to time. Obviously some automated system gets triggered to avoid suspected abuse. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of mails (approx. 1GB daily!).
• The new possibility to download ebook-files directly has been met with great interest. Currently it is rather slow and expensive on my bandwidth. For the next release I’ll come up with a better solution. Most probably I will put the converted epub/mobi files on a CDN like Akamai or something.

Only one drawback sofar: I am not entirely sure that I can migrate your sources over to the new architecture. Or, at least currently, with rather small user numbers, I am not willing to put a lot of effort in migrating them if you could easily do that in five minutes.

But then again, if you see this is a huge problem, please let me know in the comments or via email: tom@readbeam.com.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

While the changes are percolating through the internet, I’ll go out and have a barbeque now. Fed up with sysadmin for today. Enjoy your private recipes!

Some newly modified recipes are gorgeous - try ‘Ars Technica’ if you are into tech or ‘The Atlantic’ if you are into - whatever. Many thanks to Darko Miletic for all the hard work.

Dear Subscribers,

many moons have passed since I pulled the private recipe feature in ReadBeam. Tomorrow you’ll get this great feature back.

I’ll take the site offline this afternoon. When it is back online tomorrow you will be able to subscribe to absolutely completely anything you can imagine:

• Subscribe to any blog or newspaper I have never heard off - and get yourself a nice subscription
• Choose a refreshing frequency that best suits your needs
• Subscribe to your Google Reader account and get everything on the best device to actually do some reading.
• Read all your subscriptions offline, while on the train or in the air
• Already paying for some content on the interwebs? Chances are you can grab a recipe from here and simply fill in your credentials to get your already paid-for content on your favorite reader.

As the name (0.9beta) implies ReadBeam is still under heavy development and probably full of bugs. I would not dare to charge for this mess. So please report bugs and annoyances so that I can fix these asap - and finally charge money. Thanks.

Once I mangled all the bugs we’ll move to ReadBeam 1.0 final, running recipes will cost 3€ per month per recipe. Further details will be announced once I’ll get my act together. Until then please donate at least some of the currently saved money to a charity like this: International Child Care Fund.

The number of free public sources on the home page of ReadBeam.com is now smaller than before. Some sources asked not to be listed there. Feel free to run your own private recipes though. If you are a content owner and don’t want to be listed on the homepage, please let me know. No offense taken.

Happy beaming, and as always - let me know what you think.

Tom

P.S: * It said so in the template for the mailing - I couldn’t resist.

P.P.S: Thanks again to all the people who made calibre and its ecosphere possible!

Even if it takes some more time. I’ll take the opportunity to update some internals in the process and this takes more time than anticipated. So, please stay tuned!

Just a heads-up from the development room. Private recipes are going strong, I expect to release them by the end of next week. This will be a major step ‘cause it enables power users to really do as they please with the powerful ReadBeam engine.

Before the release I will move a few libraries to new major versions. Besides that we are all set. Stay tuned!

As you’ve probably already (not) seen on the site, custom subscriptions are not yet ready for prime time. I’ll let you know once I am about to roll out the new release to the testers.

Being able to add and edit your own recipes has been crucial for many of my users over the last months at readbeam.com. End of last week this feature was pulled because abuse has happened. I guess this has been unavoidable all along since my first implementation was quite naive.

In a short while I will re-release this feature as a paid service. You will be able to add and edit your own recipes and run it on your own schedule and with your own command line. I will check these recipes automatically and manually to make sure everything works nicely. The price will be around two dollars per month per recipe. 

I am interested to hear if you find the idea of a recipe marketplace appealing. This would go nicely with privately run recipes and would

1. enable less technically skilled readers to subscribe to niche content
2. earn the recipe authors some income

Let me know in the comments or via email what you think.

Right after I released V2 end of last week, sending out subscriptions broke. It took me until yesterday to get things moving again. I am sorry for the mess-up.

So, by now everything should be running smoothly. I’ll be working on private sources next.

ReadBeam lets you subscribe to online content. Imagine getting automatic updates of your favorite blogs or news sources or even your daily on your Kindle or iPad.

Either select one of the public sources, there are currently over 25 worldwide services to choose from or create your own recipe (see here for inspiration: https://github.com/readbeam/recipes/) and do what ever you like with it.

Even as a paying subscriber of The Economist or the New York Times you are currently not free to get subscriptions on your Kindle if you live outside the US or the UK. With ReadBeam you can easily subscribe to your existing subscription and have it delivered to you every morning.