We built the next Kindle app—join our demo tomorrow!
A new prototype for the future of publishing.
jake simonds and I built a new publishing app together. We’re going to give you a live demo of the product tomorrow, then we’re going to give you open access so you can start playing with it! We’ll host weekly office hours for the next four weeks where you can bring your feedback and suggestions and we’ll release weekly feature updates based on your feedback.
As a live demonstration of the ideas we’re talking about through our Interent Sovereignty pamphlet, we thought it would be fun to actually build them together: A prototype for the future of publishing on the internet. Here’s how you can join us on this experiential journey:
Register for our demo tomorrow! (We’ll share the recording on Thursday)
Join our private online community—we’ve created a chat channel just for this project!
Register for our office hours and join us for feedback and brainstorming:
April 8th, Demo Day! Register here.
April 15th, Office Hours! Register here.
April 22nd, Office Hours! Register here.
April 29th, Office Hours! Register here.
We built this because Jake Simonds is a software engineer and “open social” advocate who wants us to own our online identities rather than rent them from platforms that hold us hostage to them. I am writer who has long advocated for a disruption of the publishing industry and a way to publish books and series online that makes them easy to navigate, share, and monetize (I’ve given a TEDx talk on the topic, as well as written about it here, here, and here). We met at Network School in Malaysia and, with Claude Code now at our disposal, spent the month combining our powers to build this prototype.
We’re excited to share it with you!!!
Our app is our vision for the future of owned media. You collect an article, series, or book—it gets added to your library forever. No long-term subscription required.
Our goal is to be the perfect place to read books online. That means an app that holds your place and easily navigates to the next chapter of your book. The ability to highlight and take notes on the things you’re reading, and save those notes to an organized notebook. Only discussions are public, and they’re only available to paid collectors.
I also wanted to create the perfect place to write—that means an editor that can replace Google Docs entirely. Write directly in an aesthetically beautiful composer with a highly organized sidebar so you easily navigate long and unwieldy manuscripts. You can even invite people to comment and make suggestions on the draft, just like you can do with Google Docs, but directly in the composer and without needing to copy and paste everything from one place to another.
And no notifications ever. This is a quiet place to read and write with no social media-ification. Everything you save to your library is yours to keep, highlight, and take notes on. You can set daily, weekly, or monthly email notifications that alert you only of the things you want to be notified about.
I want to be clear: We are not planning to take on Kindle or Substack. Do not approach this project with a “How can you possibly compete for market share with Substack or Kindle?” mindset. That is not our goal. This is an art project designed to ask the question: What would we build if we were building it only for the most niche audience of people no venture capital company would focus their time and money on: writers and readers.
Our app is the vision Jake Simons and I have for that future. We were calling it “iTunes for writing” until we realized no one remembered what iTunes was. Back in the day, you could buy a single song for $1 or you could buy an album for $12 and that music would be added to your private, offline library where you could own and listen to it forever. What if you could similarly buy your favorite article for $1 or a bundle of them for $12 (a book) and could have offline access to them in your library forever?
We’re both big fans of owned media. If you subscribe to my Substack today you can access everything I write, but if you unsubscribe tomorrow you will be locked out of everything you’ve read. You don’t own it and thus you have to pay to rent it forever! Subscriptions are a great way for writers to earn ongoing support of their work, but as a reader I would also love to collect and save the writing I love. I can, after all, purchase my favorite book and grab it from my shelf whenever I want to refer back to it. I should be able to collect online articles and books the same way.
In my mind, the ideal publishing app should kill Substack, Kindle, Reader, and Google Docs—and we built that! But again, that is not our goal. It is simply to build it: the ideal place to read and write.
During the Internet Sovereignty project, we thought it would be fun to open it up to other writers and readers too so that we could continue the work of building it together. Help us create the art project! After our demo tomorrow, you’ll be able to get the app, write something in it, and publish a standalone post or series in it. Collect writing you like and save it to your library. Highlight posts and take notes on the and see all of your notes organized into your notebook. Comment on chapters alongside other collectors. Send your drafts to others and allow them to provide feedback before you publish!
For one month, this project is an experiment in developing for niche audiences rather than mass market ones. We’re building something just for us. Not something that needs to turn a big profit. I hope you’ll join the experiment with us!
See you on the call tomorrow—we’ll send it to you on Thursday if you can’t make it. See you then!
Elle & Jake
Really hope you built this on AT Protocol. 🤞