Sounds cool. But where are all the books? No Hemingway, Vonnegut, Faulkner, Kerouac, Fitzgerald. Why no classics?
I know, I'm dying to know what snarky sophomoric Internet dweebs think about Cat's Cradle rather than just read it for myself. :)
Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#72I spent about 10 minutes doing searches and couldn't find anything I was interested in. No Larry Niven, no James Michener, no William Gibson, no Max Brand, no several other authors.
So I tried some current best seller type stuff. No Stephenie Meyer, no Suzanne Collins, no Charlaine Harris. Finally found some Stieg Larsson.
The blue headlines and grey text are hard to read. The little cloud thingie seems odd. Other than that, I like the site. I clicked on links, got the review, from the original site. More content and I'd probably be a user.
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#73Really nice! I love the concept.
Can you make the slider (move me) and the category names (bestsellers, recent-in-fiction etc..) a fixed/floating bar on the page? As I scroll below / load more to view more books, I sometimes forget what category I am looking at and if I need to switch to another one.
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#74Great Idea! Can't wait to see it gain more content.
A couple of suggestions based on my quick test of the site:
- Have the author's name next to the book title (possibly clickable to get a list of other books by the author)
- Please separate Sci-Fi and Fantasy! They're completely different genres that too often get grouped together. Presumably because the fan base seems to cross over quite a bit.
Anyway, Good luck and I hope the site is a success!
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#75Great idea!
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#76This is NICE. Really. If only it had more titles...
Also, think about foreign, not-yet-translated-to-English books. For example, there are fabulous SF books in Polish (not just by Lem, and not just SF, actually...) which should be there.
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#77I think what makes RottenTomatoes' rating system pretty good is their clear indication of 'good' and 'bad': A fresh tomato and a rotten tomato.
The clouds on this website aren't bad, but I didn't even realize they were there for a few minutes while I looked over the book covers. They blended into the background and didn't instantly provide a positive or negative connotation.
Since the site's name is 'I Dream Books', perhaps a nice fluffy pillow represents a good book. Or a dream bubble with a happy face. Perhaps the badly reviewed books get a dream bubble that's bursting, or has a nightmare inside.
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#78With book search, you need to put exact titles before more popular matches. Amazon used to get this wrong, they don't any more. A telling example is "We" by Zamyatin - a classic, but there are many more recent big sellers with that word in the title, so if exact match is not prioritised, you plain can't find it if you can't remember the guys name.
I can't tell if you've got this right - maybe your database isn't big enough for it to matter yet.
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#79This would be awesome if i could set personal preference for the review sources. I really don't care what Yahoo voices or some of the other 'critics' think but you are bound to have some reliable critics in there that i do care about.
Maybe even more so than for movies readers tend have more in common with some critics then others and the 'meta' opinion is just not that interesting.
Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
#80Just a tip: the confirmation email went straight to my spam folder (with a very high spam rating). You might want to think about using something like mailgun or sendgrid for better deliverability...