41–50 of 197 posts
This is such a fashionable problem. There are startups / indiehackers trying to solve this every month.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I don't think importing tweets and displaying them is allowed by their ToS for instance (even though some apps do), nor instagram pics.
The user owns the data, not the platform. The data is just ISBN numbers, dates, review comments and so on anyway. It would probably be illegal to crawl Goodreads, if that’s what you’re thinking about?
Looks great! I wonder if it would be possible to import data from Goodreads; many people use Goodreads to keep track of what they've read, and what they're planning on reading. They wouldn't want to lose that information by switching. Giving authors tools for self-promotion is also a big deal -- and something many authors actively engage in with Goodreads. One more thing, that should be higher priority: The ability t…
Agree on the author-sentiment too. The long-term vision is this to not just be a site for readers, but a site for authors, publishers, bookstores, etc. A true ecosystem. As a reader, you can follow your favorite authors and bookstores and receive updates, but as an author you can engage with your audience and self-promote. A win-win.
We pull all of our data from Google Books currently (so to avoid needing to maintain an internal database right away), so if it's not on Booqsi it's because it's not on Google Books. It's been fairly broad in scale, but we've certainly seen situations where books don't show up. Thanks for the feedback!
this looks great Justin! I've always found Good Reads to be very unappealing. What did you use as your source of book data?
This is awesome, but I feel like you're going to struggle to compete if all the content is behind a membership wall.
This is great but I'm not going to sign up just to see what the site looks like. There's no reason for a large part of the functionality (book info, ratings, reviews) to be behind a login wall. As it stands right now Goodreads is a lot more open.
To be honest, if you're looking just for book info, ratings, and reviews, Booqsi probably isn't the right site for you anyways. It's specifically meant to be a social platform, not a ratings or reviews site, which is why we don't actually have give users the ability to do either. We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your community about books, with the underlying motivation that a book recommend…
This is great but I'm not going to sign up just to see what the site looks like. There's no reason for a large part of the functionality (book info, ratings, reviews) to be behind a login wall. As it stands right now Goodreads is a lot more open.
To be honest, if you're looking just for book info, ratings, and reviews, Booqsi probably isn't the right site for you anyways. It's specifically meant to be a social platform, not a ratings or reviews site, which is why we don't actually have give users the ability to do either. We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your community about books, with the underlying motivation that a book recommend…
Random question - Did goodreads ever make money through Amazon's affiliate program? (Before Amazon acquired them). If so, how does the site not break affiliate partners terms of service? It could effectively list every single book product on it's site and slap an affilate link on there. The ref link exists now, but a unsure how that gets rolled into current amazon metrics/accounting.
Booqsi is specifically not part of Amazon's affiliate program and instead of focused on the local bookstores via bookshop.org, so I'm not an Amazon affiliate expert, but I would imagine that Amazon wouldn't have any issue with a site like this linking users to purchase books from them.
Impressive! It's a lot of work building a product like that. Please support export of a user's data. I just lost all of my Goodreads data when some system problem of their's deleted all my data. I'm pretty mad about it, but at least I had a data export from eight months ago so not all is lost. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503465
I'm glad someone's making this! I've been wanting an alternative for a while. I do have two questions: 1) Why can't I browse the site without an account? Is this temporary for the beta phase or a persistent design choice? 2) Do reviews allow GIFs? (I'm not willing to make an account just to see if existing reviews have gifs, and oddly enough, gifs would be a deal breaker for me).
After using it a few minutes, it's apparent that it's a very social site. There are no public reviews. You can write reviews and share them with specific friends or post them to your wall, but they're only ever visible to your friends. Presumably this is a privacy-focused design decision intended to increase sociability, but it would make an anonymous account useless. There are no GIFs.
2). No GIFs. But, noted that GIFs could be a fun add.