Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads

So I search for "Proust", and the top 8 results are not Proust. Since Proust has one extremely famous book, I thought it would show up, rather than a bunch of different commentary on Proust.

So I finally find the page for In Search Of Lost Time. However, it says none of my friends have read it. Well, of course not - I don't have any Booqsi friends yet. So, there's just nothing I can do on this page.

Next I looked for The Power And The Glory. At least this page has a summary of the book. But, also none of my friends read it, and there's nothing I can do here.

Next, Consilience. Same thing. Basically I search for a book, I get maybe nothing, maybe a summary, and then there's nothing else I can do on that page.

So, I want to like this site, but I'm just finding nothing I can do here.

Personally, I love books but I hate Goodreads. I just don't care that a hundred thousand random people prefer The Twilight Saga Complete Collection to The Death of Ivan Ilych.

I would be really interested to read a well-written paragraph that said, hey, if you like Nabokov and Borges, then you might like this other author. That sort of recommendation is what I occasionally get from reading blogs or tweets from people with a similar literary taste to mine, and it's very useful, I find most books through some sort of recommendation.

Goodreads has this mistaken idea that I care about the average person's opinion of a book. A book is not a can opener. Everyone wants to open a can, everyone opens cans in the same way, everyone appreciates a can opener that successfully opens cans.

Anyway, I hope you do succeed in building a Goodreads alternative, because I would love to spend more time reading about books, reading good books, discussing books, and Goodreads is just not providing that experience.

You're not the first to use their Reminders (or Notes) app for book lists. If you're not interested in the social elements of Booqsi and just want to improve upon your current approach, a couple thoughts come to mind:

1. it's built specifically for books (unlike the Reminders app), so you'll be able to easily search for and add books to your "To read" shelf with the option to then "mark is as read" when you finished it, making it easy to track that aspect of your reading journey as well.

2. if you choose to buy it, it'll link you directly to bookshop.org to purchase it from a local bookstore instead of Amazon.

Now, if you wanted to elevate your experience, I feel like the social aspects of Booqsi is where it shines. For example:

1. if a friend drops you a book recommendation, it'll automatically add that book to your Books Recommended to Me shelf. If you like that book, you can move it to your "to read" shelf, or just go buy it. I've found it makes tracking book recs so much easier.

2. anytime someone in your community mentions a book, it'll come through your feed; you can then easily take action from it by navigating to the book's info page, adding to a shelf, going to purchase it, etc.

Those are just a few that come to mind! Regardless of if you want to use the site independently of others or engage more socially with others, there's something for everyone.