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Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

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Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#61

Post by flippyhead »

Kroem3r wrote: post #55

There are quite a few book sites providing good discoverability combined with community, combined with curated selections, etc. etc. You've added a nice design, but the categorization of the books is weak as is the selection itself. I looked at History, which seems to be comprised of 'historical fiction' and I looked for "Tony Judt" who was a significant recently published historian but is not represented.

I almost feel like this doesn't matter because none really stand out. Grabbing mind share as "the rotten tomatoes for books" I feel like is ripe for the taking

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#62

Post by thestu »

Cyranix wrote: post #57
Kroem3r wrote: post #55

There are quite a few book sites providing good discoverability combined with community, combined with curated selections, etc. etc. You've added a nice design, but the categorization of the books is weak as is the selection itself. I looked at History, which seems to be comprised of 'historical fiction' and I looked for "Tony Judt" who was a significant recently published historian but is not represented.

Can you list them? The one I'm familiar with is Goodreads, but if there are others, I'm interested.

http://www.librarything.com is another that's quite popular.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#63

Post by astine »

_nist wrote: post #59

I never understood review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and the like. Don't sites like Amazon, where you can actually buy the product, already accomplish this? Unless you have actual authors or news critics writing critiques for a book, there isn't much that makes it different from sites where you can buy the product. Anyway, why no technical literature section? Why isn't there a genre on text books? Novels are fine, bu…

On Rotten Tomatoes they do have actual news critics writing critiques. That's the whole point of the site. It's an aggregator for critical reviews of movies.

I think that this site is doing something similar.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#64

Post by Kroem3r »

Cyranix wrote: post #57
Kroem3r wrote: post #55

There are quite a few book sites providing good discoverability combined with community, combined with curated selections, etc. etc. You've added a nice design, but the categorization of the books is weak as is the selection itself. I looked at History, which seems to be comprised of 'historical fiction' and I looked for "Tony Judt" who was a significant recently published historian but is not represented.

Can you list them? The one I'm familiar with is Goodreads, but if there are others, I'm interested.

Aside from Goodreads, my list includes:

http://www.librarything.com/ http://www.shelfari.com/ http://49thshelf.com/ http://openbooktoronto.com/ http://www.filedbyauthor.com http://www.thecopia.com/home/index.html http://www.booksprouts.com/ http://www.bookglutton.com/ http://weread.com

You'll note that some of these are dead or dying, which leads me to the small point that I'd make: creating a book site is pretty easy: the audience likes print-media and there are rafts of digitized content available, but getting a site to sustain is hard.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#65

Post by alphakappa »

rahooligan wrote: post #53
socksy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We have a strict set of criteria when rating a review as positive or negative. In general, if the review is even slightly negative we rate it as such...in the case of Moonwalking, NYT expresses a few disappointments about the book. This is to help surface only the very best of books in each genre.

I'm not sure how giving such a binary 'good' or 'bad' to a review is helpful for books. Reviews could be on a continuum (hence the star rating system that many folks use) and calling a review negative just because of a few negative opinions voiced in a review could potentially miss the point of the review.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#66

Post by siodine »

The scorings are terrible. Rottentomatoes is fairly reliable for getting solid recommendations as a cinephile, but this site is giving high marks for what is clearly crap.

Maybe there just aren't enough book critics, or you're not aggregating them all, or you aren't selecting for the top critics like rottentomatoes.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#68

Post by redler »

rahooligan wrote: post #53
socksy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We have a strict set of criteria when rating a review as positive or negative. In general, if the review is even slightly negative we rate it as such...in the case of Moonwalking, NYT expresses a few disappointments about the book. This is to help surface only the very best of books in each genre.

Any review of sufficient length and thoroughness is likely to include at least some criticism, if for no other reason than the reviewer not wanting to look like a cheerleader. The NYT often selects reviewers with relevant domain knowledge, or who are themselves authors in a related genre. So opinions will be expressed, hobbyhorses ridden, and nits picked, even in glowing reviews.

You should be careful to avoid setting up a business rule that could overemphasize a few negative raisins in a positive pudding.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#69

Post by aasarava »

rahooligan wrote: post #20
afterburner wrote: post #9

Looks nice. Is it possible to have separate categories for Science Fiction and Fantasy? EDIT: Also, you should put the author's name wherever the title is displayed. (eg. in the subgenre pages)

Didn't think you could get more granular than SFF. We tried to group genres together for simplicity. But some users don't seem to be liking that. All genres/categories are currently listed in the dropdown in the header.

The dropdown doesn't have Fiction, which was surprising since that's what I went looking for first. Also, when I figured out that I could click on the "Recent Fiction" heading on the homepage, I was disappointed to see that there was no way to filter down to Literary Fiction, the way most publishers do. Otherwise, all the top items are mass market fiction, which is a very different genre.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#70

Post by knowtheory »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #37

Your search is... awkward. I'm searching for "Count of Monte Cristo" (no quotes), and I get barely-related results (starting from "The Pregnancy Countdown" to "Fifty Shades of Grey" - please tell me that "of" is a stop-word in your search algorithm!). Sidebar: Is your review aggregation automated or curated? EDIT When a cover image is not available, the results are meaningless as you must hover over each coverless re…

I think that's probably a bug. When the page first loads the results, the overlay w/ the title is visible. It's only once you've moused in and out that the overlay disappears (at leas, that's the case in Chrome).
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