141–150 of 205 posts
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It might be the general fear present in some Amazon corp offices? (PIP stories, etc.)
> general fear present I don't know about this. Is it documented, or have you "heard it through the grapevine," so-to-speak?
A) The intersection between people who love books and love technology is rather small
B) There is no 'monetization ramp up' when producing products for books and publishing
Monetization if you are a startup in books and publishing is via either
Amazon Associate - However, Amazon will kick you out if they want to enter the same business
Example: https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/06/15/amazon-brings-the-...
Selling Ads to Authors & Publishers - However Amazon will manipulate results
Example: https://the-digital-reader.com/2017/11/22/amazon-now-punishi...
so there is no easy path
Contrast that with something like Apps or Shopping where you can use affiliate networks and monetize right from the start. And a competitor like Google doesn't have control over the Affiliate networks (which in books, Amazon has)
C) Most authors are not tech savvy and keep doing crazy things like giving exclusivity to one store and create monopolies. They then get screwed by these monopolies
Why would you step into a market where
A) The competitors are monopolists who have no compulsion against doing illegal things
B) The participants (authors and Publishers) are in the 1950s technology wise
C) The participants (authors and publishers) keep doing strange stuff like give one ebook store exclusivity
CONTRAST what happened with Apps versus what happened with Books
Apps
Amazon wanted pricing control of apps and exclusivity. Developers gave them the middle finger
Amazon tried unlimited apps (including unlimited IAP purchases if you are on subscription) and developers didn't play along. They had to close down the service
Books
There were FIVE major stores - Kindle, Sony, Apple, B&N, Kobo
Amazon offered exclusivity to authors in return for (the comically bad incentive) - allowed to make book free for 5 days every 90 days, allowed to discount book as a special Kindle Countdown Deal for 7 days every 90 days
Authors gave Amazon exclusivity. Helped it get from 30-40% market share to 60-70% market share
Now completely dependent on Amazon
Kindle Unlimited - Amazon won't give authors and publishers data on how many people borrow, etc. Only 'total number of pages read'
Authors play along and now many are completely dependent on income from this 'subscription service' where they don't even know how many readers downloaded their book, how many read X% etc. Just one vague metric of 'total pages read by all readers'
So, to do well in this market you are suited for it IF
A) Your default is to take advantage of authors and publishers
OR
treat them like naive sheep who don't understand the basics of business
B) You are willing to go up against a large monopoly that will also do illegal things without remorse
Amazon just hired Keith Alexander - head of NSA during warrantless surveillance
Do you really want to compete against that?
C) somehow bridge the gap between books and publishing and technology
while keeping in mind that most of the top quality supply is controlled by 5 large companies (the Big 5 very big publishers)
You would be hard pressed to find ANY business to go into that is worse
The saying - An intelligent enemy is better than a stupid friend
This is an ecosystem where - your friends are naive (in effect, clueless), and your enemies are stupid (doing all sorts of illegal things because they are a monopoly and know the US does @#$$-all to monopoly power abusing companies
Everyone's talking about recommendations. I don't use GoodReads recommendations at all. It's a social network with a focus on books where people will actually read and discuss books and book reviews. It's also a good way of chronicling what books you read. I wish they'd focus more on that part.
If one has to build a Goodreads competition, How can one go about getting books data, book cover images etc ?
The Google Books API might be a good starting place. https://developers.google.com/books/
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Why take 60% of the rating space up by negative ratings? It seems like what you really care about is degrees of goodness. An alternative approach: 1 - I disliked it. 2 - It's OK 3 - This is good 4 - This is great 5 - This is a must-read
It's the problem with star systems, which is that we'll always have different definitions. Your 3s are living next to the other poster's 3s and mean very different things. That said, I think the world has also suffered from ratings inflation. I tend to assume anything under a 4 means "bad" or "meh" myself.
I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.
My problem with Goodreads isn't the recommendations engine. The recommendations are fine. I'm actually skeptical that any ML recommendation engine is going to recommend better books than my friends will. The only thing I expect from a recommendation engine is discovery , by which I mean finding new things that neither I nor my friends have read that look interesting. Whether they're good is another story altogether..…
Really? GoodReads reviews have devolved to complete garbage. The first few pages of reviews are always from the same people trying to be GoodReads famous. Everyone gives everything 5-star reviews because they get more likes for positive reviews. The user reviews mean nothing. I'd like to have a way to see what people actually think about books. But on GoodReads that's almost impossible to find. I'm surprised there is…
Pretty much has solved my book recommendation pain point.
The recommendations basically crapped out on me after a few hundred books. It seems there are a few cliques (graph) of recommendations that are pretty independent and if you have read these cliques in a genre recommendations just suck.
But plz give me some query syntax like https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/lwef/-search-... and most importantly the ability to filter out certain tags.
- Proper search engine (all books with x+ ratings, rated y+ start, in genre z). From what I've heard one has to scrape the site to get any useful information. - Forbidding rated reviews before release dates. This seriously skews ratings for some genres and is insanely annoying.
Okay maybe three... managing shelves is super slow. I want to be able to drag and drop and have things instantly re-ordered without a reload.