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Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

idreambooks.com

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Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#81

Post by yalooze »

knowtheory wrote: post #70
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).

While visually I really like the design, in terms of usability I'm not entirely sold on it. Book covers can be hard to read (for both the title and the author) and there can be many different cover designs which people may not recognise. I would strongly suggest adding adding the title and author as static text that you can see at all times.

One other point, I don't think the disparity between positive and negative cloud icons is big enough. On Rotten Tomatoes it's crystal clear.

Love the site concept. Have been looking for a site like this for ages. Looking forward to seeing it grow.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#83

Post by ganley »

commieneko wrote: post #72

I 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 th…

Yeah... in the Travel genre, there are exactly two books. Nice idea, but not enough content to be ready for release.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#84

Post by endersshadow »

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…

Agreed with the search being awkward. I tried searching "end of eternity" with and without quotes. In both cases, A Song of Ice and Fire as well as Fifty Shades of Gray came up [1]. I'm looking for a classic book by Isaac Asimov. For what it's worth, Amazon knows what I'm talking about immediately [2].

On top of the search algorithm being a little wonky, I think your sentiment analysis is a little off, as well. For example, for the book Caine's Law by Matthew Stover, you have the Two Pens and Kirkus reviews as negative, when in fact they were positive reviews.

I would love to see a site like this work--I'd be a constant user, but it's got some work to go before it's usable.

[1]: http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/search?q=%22end+of+eternity%...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=end%20of%20eternity

[3]: http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/232-Caine-s-Law

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#87

Post by rhizome »

jilebedev wrote: post #38
rhizome wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put a slightly finer point on it: sites like this are incredibly relational. Everything (almost) should be clickable for a collection view.

That's taking it a bit far, eh? Tasteful user interfaces answer relevant questions - not just any question at all.

For sure it's an ideal, but come on, you should be able to click on a reviewer's name to get their other reviews, or an author's name to get their other books, or a date to find other reviews posted at the same time (with its own range functionality), as well as by-publisher, by-review-site, etc.

Re: Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

#88

Post by rahooligan »

tijs wrote: post #80

Just 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...

oh no. what email service was it (yahoomail?)...dont forget to unspam it!
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