Show HN: Papertrail by Biblish – A Platform for Digital Marginalia
Hello, HN! My name is Russell, and my co-founder, Josh (imjosh on HN), and I have a simple product that we hope can earn its place in your life as a reader, called [Papertrail](https://papertrail.biblish.com). Papertrail lets you take notes digitally for the books you are reading in print in a way that is accessible and shareable. Sound good? Please, dive right in. Want to know more? Read on.

My vocation is that of a writer and publisher of literature, but frustrations with the faults, as I perceived them, in the process of reading, writing, publishing and distributing literature led me to take up coding again and try to make right-sized digital tools to augment my process wherever possible. If you are imagining that a writer of literature, whose only experience in coding comes from a handful of college courses some ten years past their expiration, would be unable to produce software that is attractive, easy to use, and not prone to error, you would be right. It was not long, thankfully, before I found Josh through a mutual acquaintance, and he was able to take on the lion’s share of the technical work. I have been relegated to internal-facing dashboards, for everyone’s good. Inspired by The Machine that Changed the World, my focus was, and remains, the improvement of the value chain of literary production, with an eye towards durably changing literary culture for the better. This esoteric motivation has produced a few services that are more generally useful, and Papertrail is one of these.

The single greatest benefit, I feel, comes with simply making your reading public-facing in some measure, and many of our imagined use cases are derived from this change in the habit of reading that Papertrail encourages. In general, our reading is disorganized. Unless we have specifically established a process to facilitate an end goal, like reading for a research project, or the study of specific skills, we might jot down a note or two in the margin of a book, but it mostly lives on our shelf and gets slowly forgotten. It is rare indeed, delightful thought it may be, for a friend to come over, see a book on your shelf they themselves have read, and engage you in a discussion about it. Papertrail creates an ecosystem where exactly this can take place, albeit digitally, and in a somewhat altered form. Not only can others see what you read, but your notes, taken in concert with your reading, are either directly available to the public, or can be requested by this other reader. The same concept works in reverse, and you can discover new books, new ways of thinking about books you have already read, and hopefully new friends, all by being able to see what others are reading on Papertrail.

If you do happen to be reading for a research project, or to study a skill specifically, then Papertrail is a ready-made process for maintaining and building upon your understanding of the books. I know HackerNews occasionally inquires about HackerNews like platforms for subjects besides technology, and I, at least, feel Papertrail can be a place like HackerNews for avid readers. We consider this a kind of MVP+ and are eager to hear your feedback. We should be able to respond throughout the day to any comments here.

My own profile on the site can be found here - [Russell's Profile](https://papertrail.biblish.com/russell)

A write up of a few hypothetical use cases and the thinking behind them can be found here - https://bapublications.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/138...

And...

drumroll

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