ReadBeam

ReadBeam will be open-sourced soon.

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:12:38 +0100

Fellow ReadBeamers,

I do have good and bad news:

Let’s have the good news first: The ReadBeam software will be open-sourced on GitHub in the next few weeks. Maybe this may help technically inclined peeps to set-up their own version of a hosted and simplified ReadBeam service. Details will be made public on the ReadBeam blog in a few days time.

Bad news: I’ll stop the press at the end of may. ReadBeam as a hosted calibre will cease to exist in approximately four weeks.

May the idea live on in the open-sourced software - information wants to be free!

Thanks to Kovid and the whole crew. It was an amazing ride!

(Details to follow here)

Sign-up failed / No eDocs today

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:31:32 +0100

Dear Beamers,

tonight we reached an important milestone with ReadBeam. We reached the maximum monthly limit of our email provider. This means I would need to pay more for sending emails. Not being able to send email means a few things: You won’t get any eDocs and signup doesn’t work as well, because both requires sending out emails.

Things will immediately work again on sunday, because the monthly limit is reset on the first of each month. This is a short term fix for the current problem.

If ReadBeam continues to grow like it did in the last months we will max out the email account even earlier next month. I will make up my mind what I plan to do with ReadBeam in the next weeks.

I could either imagine open-sourcing it so you all can do with it what you please or commercializing it, so that I can further afford to pay the servers and the growing email traffic. I am not sure that I can afford to convert it to a commercial solution, ‘cause I have plenty of paying jobs currently, but you never know…

Let me know what you think!

Happy beaming,

Tom

About to unleash the next release

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:07:58 +0000

This is basically a maintenance release (“Freezing Cooper”):

Fresh off the mill: Adopted Bootstrap 2.0 from Twitter to make things more responsive on your Kindle or iPad.
My favorite Apple quote: “General stability and performance improvements”

Due to new hardware things have stabilized significantly. Your cherished morning read should now be ready on time.

Please let me know, if things don’t work out as expected.

Hapy beaming!

Kindle Touch - Can't remove personal documents

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:04:00 +0000

Some users with a brand spanking new Kindle Touch wrote in to let me know that they are unable to delete ReadBeam documents from their Kindle.

This is not a problem of calibre or ReadBeam per se, it seems to happen once you mail personal documents via Amazon to your Kindle Touch.

One user (thanks Rainer!) just sent me a workaround: If you login to your Amazon Account and “Manage your Kindle” then you are able to delete the personal documents from there.

Give it a try, and - as always - happy beaming!

Citius, altius, fortius

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:45:27 +0000

I am currently in the thick of migrating to the new server. When you read this you will be most probably already working on the shiny new hardware.

Signup has been reenabled on the new system, please go ahead an get yourself something to read for the weekend.

Please be considerate though, keep yourself to a maximum of three eDocs, so that everybody can use this machine and the conversion delays are kept to a minimum.

Enjoy!

"My morning paper arrives too late"

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:33:39 +0000

In the last few weeks ReadBeam.com has been swamped by new users. This led to ever growing conversion times. Just converting all the morning eDocs currently takes between four and seven hours.

To alleviate the problem I have temporarily suspended signups.

I will take measures to have ReadBeam again send morning papers in the morning - one will be switching to a freemium business model. Thats fancy for: some features of the site will be usable for free, others will cost money. This will allow me to add new servers and allocate more time on developing the service.

In the meantime I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Missing Index in News Sources

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:30:03 +0000

After digging around I just found an interesting tidbit about why - sometimes - the index in the Kindle files for news sources is missing:

It sounds like you are getting the book reader, and this would be because the EXTH[501] field of the metadata is not set to NWPR (for newspaper). The latest release of calibre fixes this. HOWEVER, if you email the mobi to your Kindle, Amazon will overwrite the EXTH[501] field with PDOC which will put you back to the book reader. If you transfer the mobi via USB it doesn’t get overwritten and you’ll get the news reader which is what you obviously want.

There doesn’t seem to be any way around the email issue. Unfortunate, but “that’s progress” I guess (sarcasm).

Ebook Reader Vergleich (Comparison)

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:52:56 +0000

Ebook Reader Vergleich (Comparison)

ReadBeam 0.99 Release is Imminent

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:44:00 +0000

Yes, we are approaching ReadBeam 1.0, but before we do, I have reorganized the backend - again. The changes are getting easier on the users though, for most of you things should simply get faster and more reliable.

For now I scrapped charging money for the service - setting up the payment infrastructure is a major hassle - so, enjoy! Instead I have introduced the concept of computime, which is a fancy word for time the converter spent on crunching your docs. This way I plan to identify recipes and/or sources that create a lot of load.

I moved over all of the users (minus spam) and most of the eDocs you set up. Only a handful of private recipes got lost in the process. So if you miss anything after tomorrow evening, log in and check what eDocs are running in your account.

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

Tom

ReadBeam 0.95 is going live in the next few hours

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:56:00 +0100

The next disruptive release of ReadBeam is about to go live. Currently I am doing final testing to remove the most obvious bugs; I’ll leave the others for you :). It may take a few hours until the new version (you know it when you see it) goes live at your end of the net.

The internal data structure changed, so your subscriptions went south. Please just log-in and recreate your subscriptions to have plenty of reading material for the upcoming weekend.

I hope you do like the new outfit and workings. Please let me know if you have questions or ideas. As always, I’m just an email away: tom@readbeam.com.

Downloading is now handled by a content distribution network (Akamai), and mailing by SendGrid. This should alleviate many problems we experienced while we outgrew the old solution.

Yours truly,

Tom

P.S. Kovid and many others created plenty of new recipes in the recent months. If you e.g. like Hacker News or Smashing Magazine set up your own eDocs and have them sent to your Kindle in no time. Check out the available recipes here: eBook Reader recipes.

Email outages / quota exceeded / CDN hosting

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:23:37 +0100

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.

0.9beta is live!

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:14:28 +0100

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.

A letter from the president*

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:17:00 +0100

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!

Things are coming along...

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:05:20 +0100

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!

Private Recipes Going Strong

Mon, 30 May 2011 20:33:09 +0100

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!

Custom Subscriptions delayed

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 11:58:58 +0100

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.

CDixon Experiment: Blog in Kindle Ebook Form

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:07:00 +0100

CDixon Experiment: Blog in Kindle Ebook Form:

There is an amazing amount of useful, free information available on tech blogs for fledgling tech entrepreneurs (this list is a great place to start). I think sometimes we techies forget that this wealth of content is unknown to the non-startup world…

Private Sources - aka 'Hosted Calibre'

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 01:52:34 +0100

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

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

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

I am sorry for the mess-up!

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 06:07:00 +0100

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.

Feed your Kindle or iPad

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 06:02:01 +0100

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.