I did not see it in a quick look through the site but the most obvious missing feature would be the ability to share book lists with friends. Expanding the loan out feature to support requests would allow you to run your own little library service quite easily.
Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#12A few Qs. > WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy. You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused? > Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles. This price point…
Thanks for the reply
We validate ISBNs on our automated cataloguing feature.
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I definitely think that would be a sensible pricing model. I'll certainly look into it. Thanks for the suggestion :-)
Send me an email at shane@libramatic.com and I'll see if I can sort something out.
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We use a combination of international book databases and have a 98.5% accuracy rate.
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#13A few Qs. > WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy. You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused? > Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles. This price point…
you probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet
I've written a version of this app for my own purposes three times. Then goodreads came along. I think they are the main competitor to this sort of software right now.
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#14A few Qs. > WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy. You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused? > Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles. This price point…
> 10 EUR per year storage per 1,000 books.
Hold on, by "storage" we are just talking about a list of ISBNs linked to a user account? Or am I missing something?
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#15A couple of typos:
> Libramatic retrieves book information such as it's cover art, title, author, publisher and an even abstract automatically based just on it's ISBN code.
Both its here should be its, not it's. This is something that will make large portions of your target audience twitch.
Is my data exportable? If I sign up for a month, and scan all my books in, can I then take my data and not pay anymore?
How did you arrive at the price points? I'd be interested[1] except I have more than 1,000 books, but I'm not going to pay €30 per month.
Good luck though!
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#16I tried doing this to my book collection a few years ago. Things that I found:
* Scanning ISBNs had a failure rate of at least fifteen percent, including finding the wrong title, or no match at all.
* Many of my books did not have ISBNs. For these, using the Library of Congress number often worked, but you have to open the book, find the number, and keyboard it.
* About one in twenty of the books had to be completely entered by hand.
* Using multiple lookup services helped, but only to a degree.
I got sick of it after a couple thousand books, and never even got to the paperbacks.
I should add: Thirty clams a month is insane (I just saw the pricing). I'd never, ever pay that in rental -- I might pay up to twice that /once/ for a well-written app which stored its index in a place that I controlled.
A good FAQ to add: What's your security story? I'm putting an inventory of potentially valuable stuff into your site, how do you ensure it's not going to leak?
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#17A few Qs. > WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy. You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused? > Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles. This price point…
you probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet I've written a version of this app for my own purposes three times. Then goodreads came along. I think they are the main competitor to this sort of software right now.
goodreads is great for discovery, but my girlfriend struggled and loathed it for cataloguing.
I guess the real question is: Who is this aimed at?
My girlfriend and her vast library is very likely not to be the most common use-case.
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#18A few Qs. > WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy. You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused? > Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles. This price point…
I agree: that price is way too high, at least for private book owners.
For Mac users, the competiton is Delicious Library (http://delicious-monster.com/) for a one-time $25. Yes, that's not 'online', but is 'online' worth $300+ per year? Not to me, and I doubt I am an exception.
And yes, a library could input 1M books. For that, $30/month is nothing. However, I suspect they would want features such as the ability to add metadata such as a shelf number. They also would want to integrate this into their accounting system.
So, to me, this looks like a product that is too big for consumers and (still?) too small for professional librarians.
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#19A few Qs. > WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy. You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused? > Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles. This price point…
> 10 EUR per year storage per 1,000 books. Hold on, by "storage" we are just talking about a list of ISBNs linked to a user account? Or am I missing something?
No, lookups are the first cost... the value being to reduce the time taken to catalogue the library.
And storage is to store and manage the database (whether manually entered or ISBN looked-up).
The first (and huge) perception of value is "spare me the hours and days of typing all this junk in".
The second (and lower) perception of value is "let me access my library the way I want, any time I want".
Storage is a cheap thing, and of lower perceived value if seldom accessed (insurance scenario).
Building the catalogue is where the time saved equates into high value.
Re: Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
you probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet I've written a version of this app for my own purposes three times. Then goodreads came along. I think they are the main competitor to this sort of software right now.
goodreads is great for discovery, but my girlfriend struggled and loathed it for cataloguing. I guess the real question is: Who is this aimed at? My girlfriend and her vast library is very likely not to be the most common use-case.
Did you use the mobile app?
I used it to catalog about 600 books and was not amazed but it was probably the best free solution I have tried.
The issue for the hobbyist developer is that the libraries to do the barcode scan on the iPhone cost money. Rolling your own is a pretty big undertaking for a niche app like this. Thus all the apps are about the same level of suck.