Show HN: Zeneca – Share and discuss your favorite books

Show HN: Zeneca – Share and discuss your favorite books
zeneca.io

Some general thoughts:

- Moving over my shelves is an undertaking that'll probably take more than 30-40 minutes. Before I do that, I'd like the know about the privacy policy you folks intend to put in place.

- On a similar note, potential monetization is also something which worries me because many-a-times monetization comes at the cost of compromising on my privacy.

- I'd also like to know if exporting the data would be possible down the line.

Some UI, UX thoughts:

1. On the https://www.zeneca.io/library page, there are too many fonts, too many font sizes going on. Explicitly, there is (i) different font size, (AND SPACING!) for "Go to published library" (12.8 px), (ii) another font size for "Change your avatar" (0.9 em) , (iii) another one (understandable, in this case) for my name (1.3 em), (iv) another size for intro (16 px), (v) another for shelf description (1.1 em), (vi) another for shelf name (1.5 em) and (vii) another (18.72 px) for fin. That's too many font sizes. I strongly recommend sticking to three, or four. I would also recommend to fix the spacing on "go to published library".

2. On a similar note, I'm thinking if the avatars could be generated using Spectral (the font used elsewhere), instead of a sans-serif font which looks terribly out of place on the page. Consider using something with a bunch of ligatures ;)

3. On the main page (`/explore`), in the text "Got feedback? Let us know on twitter", you've also italicized the emoji. In my opinion, that looks unnatural, and you're probably better off italicizing just the text.

4. On the same page, avatars (in the left sidebar) have shadows, but that's the only place avatars have shadows. They're not shadowed (is that a word?) on the `/library` page, or the published page.

5. Minor suggestion: There is no way of navigating to the list-of-blog-posts page from the Getting Started Blogpost. There's actually no way of getting there at all since https://www.zeneca.io/blog/ returns a 404 page. This is a bit unusual since the Getting started page is at https://www.zeneca.io/blog/getting-started.

(edit) 6. On the published page, the tabs are presented weirdly. It could be that I'm mistaken but in my understanding of tabs, the active one is usually in bold font, black color. The inactive ones are the ones painted blue indicating that they can be clicked upon to navigate to them. In your case, on " rel="nofollow">https://www.zeneca.io/, the default, and active tab - "Library" is colored blue, and "Timeline" is colored black. This suggests that I'm on the timeline tab, and can click on library to go to it, when in fact just the opposite is true.

PS: I love the box shadow on the shelves ;)

I understand that this is a very early version of the site. Kudos for having some working thing. My suggestions above are in no way a criticism of the idea. I sure hope you folks whip up a much needed replacement to Goodreads. Godspeed.

1) are you planning to introduce passwords?

2) what are your thoughts on adding privacy settings?

2a) perhaps I want my account to be visible to only a few people, and not to everyone

2b) perhaps I like reading 'naughty' books that I don't want visible to everyone, but only selected people

3) any chance you can have a (simple comment section a-la HN) where we can 'debate'/argue/comment/discuss a book? (as you mentioned)

EDIT:

1) Who is paying for all that?

2) Add a privacy policy please (with the right content), and how are you treating GDPR?

Definitely think there's something to this. Perhaps even people historically -- for example, I'd be very curious about Victor Hugo's favorite books, etc

We'll consider going deeper on this.