271–280 of 303 posts
Couple years ago I talked to Nadia. Crazy story. End of year is a big time for her as people setup reading goals for the year I think. My wife is now using it. I wouldn't have guessed a book site would be so seasonal. https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/
Looks like a pretty cool app! "Amazon-free Goodreads" is a pretty good pitch. I'm curious how freemium model works out for them though, I could imagine a lot of people thinking the free version is good enough for them.
I think they do around $500k+ a year based on the numbers they have shared in a few spots. The new giveaway platform for authors should help jump that revenue up too.
i just feel really behind on my book reading :/ havent read a good book in like a year.
I just want to +1 the recommendation for StoryGraph. I used Goodreads for a decade but got frustrated at how little Amazon invested in it. Plus the review culture was getting toxic. Took me an hour or two to migrate all of my books over. StoryGraph isn’t necessarily better than Goodreads but it’s definitely just as good and it’s great to support software not owned by Amazon. They may own e-books but they don’t have t…
I’ve been building an app specifically to help me manage the ebooks that I own
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If you have an ISBN you can also check Worldcat, but at scale it's also probably not free. And if you're working with anything that might have an academic slant, Crossref can be useful. Book metadata is very challenging. Even the publishers of said books are pretty bad at delivering good metadata.
WorldCat doesn't have an official API for anyone but member libraries, scraping the site is not fun, and the quality of the data isn't great (it's essentially bulk-imported from member libraries' catalogs). National databases like the Library of Congress are significantly better - WorldCat is best used as a fallback for books that aren't included in the high-quality databases.
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Solidifying my dislike of Goodreads, I got my “year in books” email from them today and the first thing that loaded, at the top of the email, is an ad. For pillow cases. Folks, don’t do that
It’s cyclical. Once the StoryGraphs and Hardcovers of today are big enough to be not bothered about some users with refined UX taste they’d do the same. This repeats.
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I think they do around $500k+ a year based on the numbers they have shared in a few spots. The new giveaway platform for authors should help jump that revenue up too.
what? how?? how do so many people in the world read books that they have needs for a SECOND book review platform? i just feel really behind on my book reading :/ havent read a good book in like a year.
Reviews are a by product IMO. I mean Goodreads reviews setup is horrible, no screening, nothing helpful in the implementation, etc
Nadia does a great weekly dev log email that I enjoy as well. I highly recommend it -> https://buttondown.com/nodunayo
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well, books and book related stuff tend to propagate more through word of mouth than direct search or advertisement.
I mean I'd bet 90% of goodreads users are just googling quotes but yeah this girl got her timing right, Amazon bought goodreads and then just sat on it for like a decade... Storygraph would never ever be able to compete with goodreads on search, so they sorta had to pivot to winning on social and stickiness.
Seriously think about whether you’d refer to an adult male startup founder as a “boy.”
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It's only work if your sustenance depends on it, or if you bet on it to make it big, if you need to be compensated for it. Otherwise it's a hobby, and enjoying your hobby 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is an envious life, if you can afford it. (Barone specifically could not; he had to have a part-time job as an usher in a theater; that was work.)
There is no such thing as a 10-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week hobby.