Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

Small comment: you are using faux bolds on your headers (Bestsellers, Recent in Fiction, Recent in non-Fiction in dark gray along the top.) This is hurting readability, especially since the font is already bold. Essentially, you are applying a low-quality bold (generated by the browser or text rendering layer) to the high-quality bold that was designed by the typographer. This isn't just font wankery, it makes it hard to read the headings.

The easiest way to fix this is remove the bold declaration from your CSS. The text will still be bold, because you are using a bold font.

The other way to fix it is to go into your @font-face declarations for droid sans bold, and change the declared font-weight to be bold. This tells the browser that the font is already bold, and not to make it more bold.

Here's a before and after in FF (latest) on OS X. Faux bold: http://cl.ly/image/3R0B0z1s0A3g. Real bold: http://cl.ly/image/2A1N3w083h47.

Sorry, I think you misunderstood me, I am specifically referring to the New York Times review of it, which is one of the 4 negative reviews of the book, but if you read it is in actual fact positive. My mistake though, because I accidentally linked the same page twice when I wanted to link this the second time: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-m...

Love, love, LOVE the idea - It's one of those things that I would use every week if it worked.

Critical feedback from a potential fan:

#1 - When looking at best sellers, one of the first things I saw was, "A Dance With Dragons, 29 critic reviews | Published: August 28, 2012" - The "Published" date is obviously for something different than the book (Softcover? Trade Press?) - regardless, for book reviews what's most important is not the publication of the format (I can get that at Amazon in 2 seconds) - but the publication of the _content_

#2 - I wanted to see how Peter Hamilton's books were reviewed (very popular author, so lots of reviews of his work out there), so I typed, "Peter Hamilton" and got 17 hits, but not a single one for Peter Hamilton's books. Typing the same thing in Amazon.com, despite how common the name is, got me a page of hits comprising _only_ the Science Fiction author Peter Hamilton.

In general, it's better to focus on the 99% of what users are looking for than the long tail. Not sure if you just don't have all of the reviews entered here, but the content needs bulking up before you introduce this to the general populace.

Love the idea - I'll check in from month to month to see how it comes along.

I have to agree with this; I like the site, but a quick search for a few books that sprung to mind turned up either a pile of irrelevant results (as someone said above, sort out your stopwords; if I search for "The Gunslinger", "The Girl who Kicked the Hornets Nest" is not relevant) or nothing at all once I started trying distinctive title (Cryptonomicon, Accelerando). I'm keen for someone to do a better job on book recommendations for me, but I think this needs a lot of improvement before it'll do the trick.

Sounds cool. But where are all the books?

No Hemingway, Vonnegut, Faulkner, Kerouac, Fitzgerald.

Why no classics?