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

booqsi.com

161–170 of 197 posts

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmk if you want contributors, I was looking at building something like this as well.

Hey, would love to connect. I'm actually building a community app for book readers as well that helps with book discovery and connecting readers. Here's my email: booksforthewise@yahoo.com Our Instagram where we're building our community (over 50k+ book readers) instagram.com/booksforthewise -Jeff

Can we add a podcast angle to this? Hmu of you want contribution

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

#163
post #107

Does this contribute to the internet archive's open library? https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/about#what

mek here from Open Library -- not sure what data booqsi is using but we're very happy to share our catalog's data publicly and freely with the world

https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps

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

#164
this is great work -- if you y'all need more book data (or non-google data) or have any interest in featuring free borrow links to titles which are digitally available from the Internet Archive's digital library, let me know and I'm happy to help.

- mek from Internet Archive's Open Library

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

#165

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.

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.

You are very trusting of random people on the internet.

There is no evidence to support the claims this person makes that it's not a part of Amazon itself. (I don't believe it it is a part of Amazon either, btw) It's a huge en devour to make a social network and it's got a slick interface and design.

My gut says this is not a one man show (he says "we" alot), they have _legal_ pages on their site (evidence of their priorities?), but no details on who they actually are on their about page, (lowers my trust factor by a lot) unlike a lot of other projects around here.

So, there is more evidence to support skepticism than there is to support carelessly believing some marketing blurb.

(edit: for clarity)

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

#166
post #22

Very interesting... some feedback. 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…

tastedive.com?

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

#167
> you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting

I’ve looked at several goodreads alternatives (because the site is slow and hard to navigate), but never liked any of them. This quote might explain why. I neither want it to be social, nor exciting. I want to track books read / to be read, and see the reviews of others (preferably without 5 million emojis, but that’s neither here nor there). If anything, GR already has too much social network messiness built-in for me.

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

#168

Ironically, the feature that keeps me from using Goodreads is that I want it to be less social. Do you have the option for private bookshelves?

There's a less social version with private bookshelves here https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

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

#169

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 help…

Have you seen this? https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

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

#170
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, this really bothered me when I found out about it. I still use Abebooks but would happily switch to an alternative if there's one out there.

Try https://www.betterworldbooks.com/explore/explore-used_books - most of the time the cheapest price at Abebooks points at them anyway
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