Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice! That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website. > Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well? When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was…
> That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website. Sounds like a nice way to generate some funding, especially as you already have a number of users on your site to start wi…
>Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest >into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad > data.
Legally, you can probably use the Google Books API for a project like this (whereas I couldn't due to their rules). Or, you could also use Open Library since you don't need great data quality, only the title and author to get this running. For me it was some of the other quality issues that made it not worth my time back then.
>Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?
Not a good one: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/roadmap
I promise I will update it this weekend. I am trying to find a better embed than this text list (behind the scenes, we have a much better system).
Basically, it is:
Roll out a better ad system for our Founding Author Members (as they are heavily funding the website).
Roll out book series pages (and test a notification system for users there)
Ship a massive update to our bookshelf collections of genres, age groups, and topics. This will visually navigate and break down the most loved books of all time, trending, new, and some other cool stuff.
Improve the accuracy of our genre / topic system (as of right now, it is not doing well). And I am working to add themes and tropes into he mix.
Big improvement to book section UX.
Building a DB of all books to power features needing that going forward (going to try to see if I can use Open Library).
Add a monthly "fav read of month" program for readers.
It is a rough list; still testing and thinking on a lot of these.
And waiting for a lot of data to come back on our personalized email list -> https://shepherd.com/my-book-dna
As I am trying to really do something cool with email and waiting to make sure engagement looks good with 1,000 subscribers before I start evolving and improving it.