Literal — Track your reading and discover your next favourite book

@pietterheyden Off topic, but are you guys Dutch? My mother was Dutch and I speak it some.

@robert_stevens Hey Robert, we're currently from Germany, Denmark, Romania and US :) It's just my name that's Dutch

Hey @marty, I get the optics and therefore I’m willing to accept that without knowing the facts, you have jumped to this conclusion. It does seem quite excessive to accuse people of “ripping off” without any proof whatsoever but hey, anybody his style. I’ll address this once and then I hope we can put it to rest. We (Founders.as) started Literal together with @pietterheyden early 2020, not like 10 days ago as your message seem to imply. If you are interested in the facts, I can share them with you: We had a call with @azizfirat over summer last year (when it was called readng.co), when we found out we were working on something quite similar. The end of the chat was basically that we had two different approaches on how to make it sustainable and that these two different ways of doing it would (my conclusion at least) lead us to work in the same space but be relevant for different people. At that point in time we had already locked our offering and style in, and for better or worse haven’t changed it much since. We’ll dig up some timestamped designs from last year and share them so we can put this to rest. The situation now is our brands look more similar than we’d like. It sucks. But we’re going to keep doing what we personally like and are not going to start doing something that’s not “us” based on what others are doing. Having said that, it is a free world and many things look similar without people having to fight or accuse each other with unsubstantiated claims. I sincerely hope you have changed your mind about this and as said, we can close it like this, while an apology would be appreciated. Take care Edit: here's the full story for those who are interested: https://literalclub.notion.site/...

@okuclub @marty We went through the whole "look & feel" thing decades ago with Lotus 1-2-3. Try both products. See where the differences lie. If Literal is literally just copying Oku, they'll never make it, because they'll always be behind. This isn't Microsoft copying something and then using their market clout to overwhelm the original developers. If you have substantive claims, like point by point comparisons, then make them.

@fabian_kutschera Thanks Fabian! For now it's only a few friends who're running the different clubs, but we'll open it up to everybody within the next months time and also make it work a bit better for smaller private friend groups.

@fabian_kutschera Shoot me a mail at sebastian@literal.club if you'd like to test it out while we're still in building mode btw.

@alexandberg Thanks Alex! Super inspiring following along with your reading... If any of you are curious you can get closer to a minimalist zen state here https://literal.club/alex

@geffrey Hah, yeah, we had planned on launching later the same week actually, but postponed it to not have too much noise since there's a lot of overlaps. Right now I'd say Oku is the place to be if you're into goals/tracking and we're a bit heavier on the community stuff with clubs and highlighting. Would actually love to hear your thoughts on it, if you'll be giving it a shot!

@pallavi_khanna Hey Pallavi – happy to hear, it's exactly what we've been trying to nail! Still not quite there, but we hope that clubs can be a good way into it.

@ramnes Hey Guillaume, thanks! You can sign up to our Android waitlist to vote for a dedicated Android app and get notified about it: http://eepurl.com/hEgfgz In the meantime, you can definitely use Literal as a mobile web app. It's just missing a few nice features like scanning in text as highlights or push notifications. We're working on improving our search a lot, especially on mobile. So stay tuned :)

@michael_sica_lieber Thanks Michael! 🙏