Story

In 2020 I posted this, "Show HN: Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752

It got front page for a few hours. I posted in the anniversary of when The Count of Monte Cristo first started to be published in serialized form. To celebrate it, I created a website called "Serial Literature" that allowed you to subscribe and read the book in a similar way, serialized, but in your email. I also added another famous work that was initially published serialized, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I later added about other 100 books to be read the same way (not all of them originally serialized).

I never posted about it anywhere else (maybe flopped on Reddit, I don't remember), but it got a lot of engaged subscribers. It never grew over that initial HN burst (I never advertised it again), but it got about 1,000 subscribers and, years later, a few dozens of those were still reading some book through Serial Literature.

That was until... a startup failed and my web app wouldn't work anymore.

At the time, I wanted to build something serverless and learn some new tech. I chose FaunaDB, learned their proprietary query language (FQL), actually enjoyed it a lot, and built the site with it. It was pretty neat and worked fine. But then, 5 years later, around June last year, their service stopped working (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414742). As it was serverless, the DB was also on their cloud, hosted by the failed startup, in a proprietary format. One day, Serial Literature stopped working overnight. I downloaded the data, but in their weird format, it was not very helpful.

I got a bunch of emails in the last months asking about it, people wanting to continue reading more through their email, where I explained what happened and promised it would come back in some form. This site I am showing now, Confabulists, is the come back.

I am a writer myself, indie, self-published, science fiction writer, and I missed a newsletter/blog platform more adequate for fiction writers, so I built one myself. And, yesterday, I finally completed bringing all those public domain books in English to Confabulists and now I am able to offer that same service of Serial Literature, again, still for free.

I hope this reaches everyone that loved Serial Literature, but just accepted it was gone and never contacted me (the ones who contacted me I am replying back telling them about Confabulists).

Thanks HN!