The next innovation I expect to see on HN is a service that, on a set schedule, gathers articles about a set of topics that you follow, prints them out onto paper, and delivers them to you as a bound volume for easy perusal.
This has a number of advantages for privacy (there's no way for the publishers to know how much time you spent reading each story), offline-first availability (dead-tree is the ultimate), and sharing (you can hand someone the entire volume rather than just a link to it, and they get the whole contents, all offline).
It really sounds like it could be the hot new thing, if only some forward-thinking VC would invest in it.
You are joking, but I honestly would like it to get a personalized weekly collection of articles, a wiki lemma, a comic or two and some reviews delivered as PDF or on paper.
The crux being that it's personalized. It could use my Pocket, RSS reader, reddit/hn voting habits, even my bookmarks db as inspiration. I don't know or care, as long as it manages to deliver me a week's worth every week. Filled with content that I'm going to like 90% of the time, i'd love it and pay for it. I'd even accept ads every few pages.
From what I understand and from what I know of Google (or any big tech), this won't be a "weekly" digest, but rather a constant barrage of "personalized" attention seeking push notifications. Breaking news! Something you should comment on! This movie is trending, watch it now! Your friends have read this book, why haven't you!? Kinda stuff.
What I envisioned, is truly slow paced. Like the "old" in depth weekly magazines. Or journals. Something that I have a week to go through, and that doesn't get stale if I don't.
Maybe I should make it myself (though I guess that's my impulsive ADD brain tricking me into yet another hare chase)
> prints them out onto paper, and delivers them to you as a bound volume for easy perusal.
You joke, but this would be great, and something that every digital solution has failed at replicating so far.
The best we have are newsletters (each from a different site/author) which clutter up my inbox and make me not want to read them. A printed weekly digest of everything (preferably with the comment threads included) would be a great way to spend a weekend.
You can get a subset of the English Wikipedia printed and bound, that gives you even more privacy, as you don't need to share the topics you are interested in with any electronic service.
Hint: Using a public (book) library also means your reading behavior is tracked by intelligence agencies, unfortunately, so you need to own the books you may want to read.
