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

booqsi.com

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

#111

Post by hombre_fatal »

randomcatuser wrote: post #59
hombre_fatal wrote: post #18

I once was part of a now-defunct reading forum in my teens. On the forum, people would package three related books into quests. A boring example would be a dystopian quest pack with three books about three very different dystopian scenarios. But the quests people put together were usually more interesting. I remember a "Weird Magic" quest had books with really unconventional magic systems. I found Motherless Brooklyn…

Oh this is so neat!! Thanks for the idea Anyone want this? Can have it up in March

It's hard to imagine ideas like this living as a stand-alone idea rather than a feature in a more general book-tracking platform.

Maybe I'm just uncreative, or maybe I'm too tempted to always generalize everything, but it seems like as soon as you implement a user log-in system for any sort of interactivity, you would then be tempted to import a book dump into your database, and the next thing you know you're now a Goodreads, Storygraph, Librarything, Booqsi, Bookwyrm, Booksloth, Oku.club, etc. competitor.

After all, most of the magic was in the community users creating and sharing fun quests and the natural curating effect of being able to sort by the most popular quests. And as you can imagine, most quests were generic and bad. "chuck123's sci-fi quest"

It was also fun to see how many quests you started by completing a single quest. Due to overlap, you'd be one book away of completing other quests, usually a book you would have never read otherwise which was part of the fun, and then you'd be another book away from finishing even more quests.

Too bad Goodreads' API is dead, else you could at least build interesting things on top of a "Login with Goodreads" button without recreating an entire platform. Kind of like how health apps on iOS get read/write access to HealthKit instead of all of them building their own pedometer and asking you to constantly reenter and update your data.

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

#113

Post by wnolens »

I'd love to have a reading list well-managed and with minimal friction to add and track (without buying yet).

I use both 1. Amazon shopping list, and 2. a custom chrome extension -to- airtable action.

The second lets me track who recommended this to me and why I would want to read this. Usually I have this context only at the moment of discovering a new book (often on HN, or blogs I frequent) but it's incredibly helpful when deciding what next book to read.

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

#115

Post by jeromegv »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #80
justinberding wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal isn't to be another reviews or ratings site; that's been done before. The goal is to leverage the power of your personal book community to help you better decide what to read next. Drop book recommendations to each other, post about books to your feed and engage in discussion, see what your friend's favorites are by viewing their top 10 favorites shelf, etc.

But that is not an alternative to Goodreads' public view. It's only a copy of Goodread's social system. Why are you more trustworthy than Amazon with my book reading habits? NOTE: Your IP address for booqsi.com appears to be run on ... AWS ... seems ironic or shady, can't tell which.

Are you purposely trying to be in bad faith? It's fine to give ideas and suggestions, but you are being VERY antagonistic. They are using Heroku FFS, this isn't a "shady" service because of that.

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

#116

Post by jimmygrapes »

randomcatuser wrote: post #59
hombre_fatal wrote: post #18

I once was part of a now-defunct reading forum in my teens. On the forum, people would package three related books into quests. A boring example would be a dystopian quest pack with three books about three very different dystopian scenarios. But the quests people put together were usually more interesting. I remember a "Weird Magic" quest had books with really unconventional magic systems. I found Motherless Brooklyn…

Oh this is so neat!! Thanks for the idea Anyone want this? Can have it up in March

I imagine this sort of Quest thing could also be used to incentivize reading, ala the BookSmart program (personal pan pizzas as a reward worked quite well when I was younger). Or to otherwise gamify reading. Or... it could be a mess of trying to tie points to yet another social media account.

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

#117

Post by pavon »

pessimizer wrote: post #67
karaterobot wrote: post #29

I'm glad another site for book lovers exists, and I wish you well! But I think it's sad that Librarything has such poor marketing and branding that nobody ever thinks "well, there already is a better, cooler replacement for Goodreads, and it doesn't cost anything". It's been around for 17 years, has 2.6 million users, and very few people know about it.

I always thought Librarything was also bought by Amazon. later: According to some pretty stale info on Wikipedia, Abebooks bought 40% of Librarything in 2006, and Amazon bought Abebooks entirely in 2008. edit: https://blog.librarything.com/2008/08/abebooks-news-the-scoo... https://www.librarything.com/topic/152033 > At the same time, it's well known that Amazon has an indirect but real stake in LibraryThing—they boug…

I did not know Amazon had purchased Abebooks. Damn our antitrust regulators have been asleep for a long time.

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

#118

Post by coupdejarnac »

elefantastisch wrote: post #104
coupdejarnac wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's zero chance I sign up for this if I can't see it beforehand. It's not a good look for something that purports to be more open than goodreads.

From what I can tell, there is literally nothing to show if you don't sign up. The site is entirely social. You have a feed and recommendations which are shared among friends. It's basically like saying there's zero chance you'll sign up for email if you can't see it beforehand.

What an absurd thing to say.

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

#119

Post by bduerst »

all_usernames wrote: post #101
bduerst wrote: post #95

As a potential power user of your platform, let me just say I really hope you solve the book recommendations problem, agnostic of sales or other influence. I spent almost as much time hunting for new books/authors as I do actually reading them. Social feeds, custom bookshelves, etc. are all already-solved problems or window dressing compared to this real gap of creating a truly usable book graph.

I really like the idea of a book graph. Heck, if the platform suggested that I read the references for books I'm currently reading, that would be interesting.

Yeah, Amazon's seems to be based off of customer purchase history and some tagged metadata, but almost always just ends up recommending the most popular book by sales (which are not necessarily the best).

Short of some infeasible brute NLP of books, I can't really think of ways to do this in an automated fashion, outside of gamifying data input from users.

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

#120

Post by mtlynch »

justinberding wrote: post #92
RobertRoberts wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is not an alternative to Goodreads' public view. It's only a copy of Goodread's social system. Why are you more trustworthy than Amazon with my book reading habits? NOTE: Your IP address for booqsi.com appears to be run on ... AWS ... seems ironic or shady, can't tell which.

Yeah, we're using Heroku, which host all of their own services on Amazon's EC2 (meh), which was an unfortunately short-sighted tech decision early on that we're looking to remedy. We're hoping to transition to Azure or Google Cloud. Any recommendations?

I'm a happy fly.io customer. For small projects (i.e. you don't need 100 servers), I find them to be way better than any of the enterprise-focused players. They're like Heroku if Heroku had continued innovating.
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