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Comment by anticsapp | Hacker News Reader

This is a really good idea. This has nothing to do with the current crisis but if you could somehow credibly guarantee hosting for 50+ years people could read stories to their yet to be born grandchildren. People with terminal diseases and a two year old could still read to their children after their passing. Consider it.

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I created an app that allows you to do that.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.juliushuij...

You create a book in the app by taking pictures. Add audio to a page.

You can export the book in a .zip file, that you can put on your desktop and view in your browser.

To be honest, de sharing experience sucks (ever tried getting a big .zip file from a mobile phone to a desktop..?), also the browser view doesn't have the flipping pages.

It's a pet project I've often neglected for a couple of years, and then put some extra effort in. But I'm now working on the online part, where you can upload the zip file, and share the book via an URL, and does have the flipping pages.

Would love to get feedback, so if someone wants to try it out, contact me and I can create account for you.

Would be great to make a commercial product out of it, but I used to not have the tech skills, and now pretty much have the skills, but finding the time is the challenge. Also I refuse to add ads :)

We've created a lightweight app that creates a custom format of audio + photo + your metadata (tags, notes etc): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.pointo

You can share a specific recording by creating a link valid for 24 hours, intended for p2p sharing.

We've heard people use this for similar things: teachers teaching kids, journaling, voice memos, tracking investment decisions, recipes etc. Limitation is that there's one photo per recording atm.

You can say I’m stuck in 1992 but you could use a desktop application to record a file that you could be responsible for yourself.

At $.02/GB you could host a 1 GB video on S3 for about $12.

Based on past performance that price would probably be even cheaper as the per-GB-month price keeps dropping.

The video would be likely be much smaller than 1 GB so you could instead spend the same money to put it on all three major clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google, storage tiers for the same price.

I’m willing to bet $100 that at least one of them will still be operating a cloud blob store in 50 years.

When you think about it, these files won't need to be accessed very often or quickly, so you could reduce the costs to $2.5 per GB by using AWS Glacier. I mean what is an extra 3-5 hour wait when you have already been waiting 50 years...

Amazon should offer this as a service. For a fixed fee, storage on S3 for as long as it remains operational.

The combination of Moore's (nee Kryder's) Law and ability to internally invest the principle should make it financially viable to offer such a product.

But the reason to do it would be the branding. AWS is a bedrock of the internet. Some fly by night startup offers a cloud based image editor, but Amazon is the one that guarantees your drawings will outlast them, and you.

Given Bezos' involvement in the 10k year clock project it might be up his alley even if there's not a watertight business case for it.

You could probably hash the recording names/details and store that on a world-readable unique public URL and feed those to your users through internet archive links.

You could actually build this really quickly.

- Create a site where people can manually upload phone videos of them reading a story to their child.

- Store it in S3 or Glacier

- Have a request access section - basically a contact me form. You will anyways need to verify the individual, so this part can be completely manual.

Why not give it a shot?

Wouldn't YouTube suffice for that?

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