|
| bduerst wrote:
| As a potential power user of your platform, let me just say I
| really hope you solve the book recommendations problem, agnostic
| of sales or other influence. I spent almost as much time hunting
| for new books/authors as I do actually reading them.
|
| Social feeds, custom bookshelves, etc. are all already-solved
| problems or window dressing compared to this real gap of creating
| a truly usable book graph.
| all_usernames wrote:
| I really like the idea of a book graph. Heck, if the platform
| suggested that I read the references for books I'm currently
| reading, that would be interesting.
| lacker wrote:
| Very interesting... some feedback.
|
| So I search for "Proust", and the top 8 results are not Proust.
| Since Proust has one extremely famous book, I thought it would
| show up, rather than a bunch of different commentary on Proust.
|
| So I finally find the page for In Search Of Lost Time. However,
| it says none of my friends have read it. Well, of course not - I
| don't have any Booqsi friends yet. So, there's just nothing I can
| do on this page.
|
| Next I looked for The Power And The Glory. At least this page has
| a summary of the book. But, also none of my friends read it, and
| there's nothing I can do here.
|
| Next, Consilience. Same thing. Basically I search for a book, I
| get maybe nothing, maybe a summary, and then there's nothing else
| I can do on that page.
|
| So, I want to like this site, but I'm just finding nothing I can
| do here.
|
| Personally, I love books but I hate Goodreads. I just don't care
| that a hundred thousand random people prefer The Twilight Saga
| Complete Collection to The Death of Ivan Ilych.
|
| I would be really interested to read a well-written paragraph
| that said, hey, if you like Nabokov and Borges, then you might
| like this other author. That sort of recommendation is what I
| occasionally get from reading blogs or tweets from people with a
| similar literary taste to mine, and it's very useful, I find most
| books through some sort of recommendation.
|
| Goodreads has this mistaken idea that I care about the average
| person's opinion of a book. A book is not a can opener. Everyone
| wants to open a can, everyone opens cans in the same way,
| everyone appreciates a can opener that successfully opens cans.
|
| Anyway, I hope you do succeed in building a Goodreads
| alternative, because I would love to spend more time reading
| about books, reading good books, discussing books, and Goodreads
| is just not providing that experience.
| justinberding wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! The book's info page doesn't have a
| lot going on, except to see some info about the book (or add it
| to a shelf, or recommend it to a friend) and see if any of your
| friends have read it.
|
| Your comments about Goodreads and the average random person's
| opinion is spot on and one of the inspirations for wanting to
| build something new. I noticed that its my actual friends and
| family -- not necessarily a random person -- that have the
| biggest impact on what I read next. A book rec from a friend
| you respect goes a long way. Booqsi is attempting to harness
| some of that.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Dear @justinberding is there an API for Booqsi data? Are you
| welcoming corporate re-tweets of content? Who is the best person
| to reach out to?
| justinberding wrote:
| We're pulling all of our book data from the Google Books API,
| so Booqsi itself doesn't store any of that data. As for
| reaching out, feel free to email contact@booqsi.com.
| underyx wrote:
| Another alternative I've seen recently is https://oku.club/
| [deleted]
| wnolens wrote:
| I'd love to have a reading list well-managed and with minimal
| friction to add and track (without buying yet).
|
| I use both 1. Amazon shopping list, and 2. a custom chrome
| extension -to- airtable action.
|
| The second lets me track who recommended this to me and why I
| would want to read this. Usually I have this context only at the
| moment of discovering a new book (often on HN, or blogs I
| frequent) but it's incredibly helpful when deciding what next
| book to read.
| erikwiffin wrote:
| Ironically, the feature that keeps me from using Goodreads is
| that I want it to be _less_ social. Do you have the option for
| private bookshelves?
| justinberding wrote:
| Ha, totally get that as well. Yes, private bookshelves are
| available! The only ones that are "public" are the shelves on
| your Profile.
| snthd wrote:
| https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/reading-log
| [deleted]
| supermdguy wrote:
| I've been using this for a few months now and it's great! Love
| the more nuanced options for reviewing and tagging books.
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I'm building something similar over at https://bookends.app.
| Still relatively new as well.
|
| Good luck and I wish you all the success!
| justinberding wrote:
| Looks cool. Good luck!
| personjerry wrote:
| There's one of these every other week. IMO "more social" and
| "Amazon-free" aren't the 10x improvements you need to compete
| with Goodreads
| Dave_TRS wrote:
| "more social" and "Amazon-free" may also not lend themselves
| well to bundling together. For me personally I'd love an
| Amazon-free version of goodreads that was built by someone who
| actually cared and updated it. The social stuff is a huge turn
| off though especially knowing it is being forced on the user
| judging from the other comments here
|
| Reminds me of Brave browser that lumps "privacy browser" with
| "browser stuffed full of weird crypto crap", the latter I could
| do without.
| kevmo wrote:
| This is awesome, but I feel like you're going to struggle to
| compete if all the content is behind a membership wall.
| justinberding wrote:
| Totally get the sentiment, but also felt like a membership wall
| was required for building out a platform that is primarily
| social in nature. Would be interesting to see what anonymous
| features we can provide down the road.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I suspect the anonymous features are how you get more road. I
| assume that 99% of people, even with an interest in an
| alternative to Goodreads and Librarything, are going to
| bounce when faced with registration, and since they haven't
| seen anything, won't remember anything.
|
| If you're going to demand registration, I think you have to
| make a good value proposition off the bat. Probably in the
| form of a specific practical way the site can be used as an
| application, with the social thing as a bonus. Right now it
| looks like a site that after I spend a lot of time entering
| my books into for the dubious benefit of seeing a picture of
| them on a virtual bookshelf, will be a ghost town abandoned
| within a year.
|
| Maybe make the database tools very general and flexible, with
| easy exports and reports, and push that first? I think of
| Goodreads, Librarything, and for a slightly leftfield
| comparison Boardgamegeek, as database-first sites that build
| community on the fact that they provide free, specialized,
| and sometimes publicly accessible databases to hobbyists.
| uneekname wrote:
| I'm a huge Letterboxd fan, and have thought for a long time that
| a similar app could gain traction for books. I hope this is it!
| databased wrote:
| I'm not too into the social activities when it comes to the media
| I consume, but I do use https://rate.house/ to keep track of
| everything.
| slickdork wrote:
| I'm glad someone's making this! I've been wanting an alternative
| for a while. I do have two questions:
|
| 1) Why can't I browse the site without an account? Is this
| temporary for the beta phase or a persistent design choice?
|
| 2) Do reviews allow GIFs? (I'm not willing to make an account
| just to see if existing reviews have gifs, and oddly enough, gifs
| would be a deal breaker for me).
| mminer237 wrote:
| After using it a few minutes, it's apparent that it's a very
| social site. There are no public reviews. You can write reviews
| and share them with specific friends or post them to your wall,
| but they're only ever visible to your friends. Presumably this
| is a privacy-focused design decision intended to increase
| sociability, but it would make an anonymous account useless.
|
| There are no GIFs.
| justinberding wrote:
| 1). Persistent design choice, as its built to be primarily a
| social platform. We felt like an account with your name was
| bare minimum for something like this to function correctly.
|
| 2). No GIFs. But, noted that GIFs could be a fun add.
| slickdork wrote:
| I actually wanted to make sure there were no gifs. I feel
| like gifs ruin reviews and make low quality reviews get the
| most 'engagement'.
| paxys wrote:
| This is great but I'm not going to sign up just to see what the
| site looks like. There's no reason for a large part of the
| functionality (book info, ratings, reviews) to be behind a login
| wall. As it stands right now Goodreads is a lot more open.
| justinberding wrote:
| To be honest, if you're looking just for book info, ratings,
| and reviews, Booqsi probably isn't the right site for you
| anyways. It's specifically meant to be a social platform, not a
| ratings or reviews site, which is why we don't actually have
| give users the ability to do either.
|
| We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your
| community about books, with the underlying motivation that a
| book recommendation from a friend (or seeing what their
| favorites are) is inherently more powerful than a random review
| online.
|
| Having a login and simple profiles that represent your person
| seemed like the bare minimum for a social platform to function.
| Also worth noting... we're trying the magic link approach for
| logins, so a one-time email input is all that's required.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| There's zero chance I sign up for this if I can't see it
| beforehand. It's not a good look for something that purports
| to be more open than goodreads.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| From what I can tell, there is literally nothing to show if
| you don't sign up. The site is entirely social. You have a
| feed and recommendations which are shared among friends.
| It's basically like saying there's zero chance you'll sign
| up for email if you can't see it beforehand.
| criddell wrote:
| What's the downside to letting people who are just checking
| out your site actually check out your site?
| justinberding wrote:
| No downside, it's just not something the site provides
| today as part of beta. An anonymous experience is something
| we're exploring.
| dymk wrote:
| A sign-up wall for a site which should be able to show me
| public book reviews and recommendations is a non-starter
| for me (and probably 99% of users clicking the link). I
| really don't need another social media platform, I would
| like a book discovery system though.
| [deleted]
| drcongo wrote:
| You're going to miss out on a hell of a lot of organic search
| locking it away like that, and given your social platform
| goals, I would have thought growing the user base would be
| pretty important.
| impalallama wrote:
| signed up and the rating system is borrowed wholesale from
| google books and there are no reviews at all; so rating and
| reviews are not even a feature (yet?). not a good look, i'd
| love an alternative to goodreads but not even having a basic
| rating system is kinda defeats whatever purpose this site might
| be going for
| justinberding wrote:
| The goal isn't to be another reviews or ratings site; that's
| been done before. The goal is to leverage the power of your
| personal book community to help you better decide what to
| read next. Drop book recommendations to each other, post
| about books to your feed and engage in discussion, see what
| your friend's favorites are by viewing their top 10 favorites
| shelf, etc.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| But that is not an alternative to Goodreads' public view.
| It's only a copy of Goodread's social system.
|
| Why are you more trustworthy than Amazon with my book
| reading habits?
|
| NOTE: Your IP address for booqsi.com appears to be run on
| ... AWS ... seems ironic or shady, can't tell which.
| jrd259 wrote:
| You can quite reasonably want to be independent of
| Amazon-the-online-retailer while being agnostic about
| cloud service providers. Speaking personally, I very much
| want local bookstores in my neighbourhood, but do not
| care whether there is a cloud data centre in my city or
| province, or which one it is.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Are you purposely trying to be in bad faith? It's fine to
| give ideas and suggestions, but you are being VERY
| antagonistic. They are using Heroku FFS, this isn't a
| "shady" service because of that.
| justinberding wrote:
| Yeah, we're using Heroku, which host all of their own
| services on Amazon's EC2 (meh), which was an
| unfortunately short-sighted tech decision early on that
| we're looking to remedy. We're hoping to transition to
| Azure or Google Cloud. Any recommendations?
| dymk wrote:
| Double ironic when the creator is saying things like:
|
| > "... having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of
| the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first
| place"
| yosito wrote:
| This 100%, if you can't show me your site/app without
| collecting my personal information, it's a dark pattern, and
| I'm not interested in using an app that leads with a dark
| pattern.
| adamontherun wrote:
| this looks great Justin! I've always found Good Reads to be very
| unappealing.
|
| What did you use as your source of book data?
| justinberding wrote:
| Thanks! Google Books is our source currently.
| stanislavb wrote:
| I want a password login, not a magic linkery :crying:
| boplicity wrote:
| Looks great! I wonder if it would be possible to import data from
| Goodreads; many people use Goodreads to keep track of what
| they've read, and what they're planning on reading. They wouldn't
| want to lose that information by switching.
|
| Giving authors tools for self-promotion is also a big deal -- and
| something many authors actively engage in with Goodreads.
|
| One more thing, that should be higher priority: The ability to
| add books to the database. There's nothing more frustrating than
| wanting to add a book to a shelf, and not being able to! (Maybe
| it's already an option? If so, it's not easy to find.)
| justinberding wrote:
| Definitely! Goodreads import is in the pipeline.
|
| Agree on the author-sentiment too. The long-term vision is this
| to not just be a site for readers, but a site for authors,
| publishers, bookstores, etc. A true ecosystem. As a reader, you
| can follow your favorite authors and bookstores and receive
| updates, but as an author you can engage with your audience and
| self-promote. A win-win.
|
| We pull all of our data from Google Books currently (so to
| avoid needing to maintain an internal database right away), so
| if it's not on Booqsi it's because it's not on Google Books.
| It's been fairly broad in scale, but we've certainly seen
| situations where books don't show up. Thanks for the feedback!
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| I'd recommend to add social login options. It greatly reduce the
| initial barrier to sign up. Besides the usual suspects like
| Google or Microsoft, Github, Discord are also very good options.
| justinberding wrote:
| Definitely. On the roadmap, with Google as one of the first
| we're rolling out. Not only does it reduce the barrier to sign
| up, it also helps you discover (or invite) friends.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I once was part of a now-defunct reading forum in my teens.
|
| On the forum, people would package three related books into
| quests. A boring example would be a dystopian quest pack with
| three books about three very different dystopian scenarios.
|
| But the quests people put together were usually more interesting.
| I remember a "Weird Magic" quest had books with really
| unconventional magic systems. I found Motherless Brooklyn
| (detective with Tourette's) in a quest pack of "heroes with
| issues". Other quest ideas would be evil protagonists, alien
| first-contact with the wrong guy, and stuff like that. You can
| often find three books for even the goofiest of quests.
|
| It was a cool way to find new books. And whenever you didn't know
| what to read next, you'd look at what quests you were still
| working on and choose among them. Once finished, your completed
| quest count would increase.
|
| Long append-only lists of genre-related books were never as
| interesting to me. Quests only having three books made them a fun
| thing to collect. Maybe there's something fun there that new
| goodreads competitors can experiment with.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is a great idea. I often go on a month-long tangent of
| related books, films, podcasts and articles. Currently it's the
| space race and the war in Afghanistan. It would be cool to have
| "an introduction to _____" lists for this.
| Lanley wrote:
| Are you familiar with shepherd.com ? It's a site with short
| curated lists on just about any topic. It's still in beta, so
| growing
| [deleted]
| justinberding wrote:
| Love this idea. Gamification of reading is something people
| have dabbled with for awhile; would be great to eventually
| build in something like you mentioned.
| randomcatuser wrote:
| Oh this is so neat!! Thanks for the idea
|
| Anyone want this? Can have it up in March
| Kooshaba wrote:
| I'm in, let me know when ready
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| It's hard to imagine ideas like this living as a stand-alone
| idea rather than a feature in a more general book-tracking
| platform.
|
| Maybe I'm just uncreative, or maybe I'm too tempted to always
| generalize everything, but it seems like as soon as you
| implement a user log-in system for any sort of interactivity,
| you would then be tempted to import a book dump into your
| database, and the next thing you know you're now a Goodreads,
| Storygraph, Librarything, Booqsi, Bookwyrm, Booksloth,
| Oku.club, etc. competitor.
|
| After all, most of the magic was in the community users
| creating and sharing fun quests and the natural curating
| effect of being able to sort by the most popular quests. And
| as you can imagine, most quests were generic and bad.
| "chuck123's sci-fi quest"
|
| It was also fun to see how many quests you started by
| completing a single quest. Due to overlap, you'd be one book
| away of completing other quests, usually a book you would
| have never read otherwise which was part of the fun, and then
| you'd be another book away from finishing even more quests.
|
| Too bad Goodreads' API is dead, else you could at least build
| interesting things on top of a "Login with Goodreads" button
| without recreating an entire platform. Kind of like how
| health apps on iOS get read/write access to HealthKit instead
| of all of them building their own pedometer and asking you to
| constantly reenter and update your data.
| hsndmoose wrote:
| Lmk if you want contributors, I was looking at building
| something like this as well.
| [deleted]
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| I imagine this sort of Quest thing could also be used to
| incentivize reading, ala the BookSmart program (personal pan
| pizzas as a reward worked quite well when I was younger). Or
| to otherwise gamify reading. Or... it could be a mess of
| trying to tie points to yet another social media account.
| notenoughhorses wrote:
| Yes
| webmaven wrote:
| Sure, I'd be interested.
| itake wrote:
| I'd be curious about this too. where can I signup to get a
| notification?
| skeaker wrote:
| That's a really fun and interesting concept! The way that quest
| names can be more specific than broad genres while still
| encompassing several books is great, because you kind of know
| what you're getting into without giving away the whole book.
| "Weird Magic" makes me want to look deeper immediately because
| that alone is a great hook. (If you happen to recall what the
| Weird Magic books were, I'd love to know!)
| justshowpost wrote:
| skn0tt wrote:
| awesome to see a Blitz.js-built app on the front page :)
| ramoz wrote:
| Random question - Did goodreads ever make money through Amazon's
| affiliate program? (Before Amazon acquired them). If so, how does
| the site not break affiliate partners terms of service? It could
| effectively list every single book product on it's site and slap
| an affilate link on there. The ref link exists now, but a unsure
| how that gets rolled into current amazon metrics/accounting.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Do the affiliate terms of service say anything about linking to
| too many things? I would think Amazon would be thrilled to have
| a popular site link to millions of their products.
| justinberding wrote:
| That's a great question. I can't say for sure that Goodreads
| was part of Amazon's affiliate program prior to them being
| acquired in 2013, but I don't see why they wouldn't have been.
|
| Booqsi is specifically not part of Amazon's affiliate program
| and instead of focused on the local bookstores via
| bookshop.org, so I'm not an Amazon affiliate expert, but I
| would imagine that Amazon wouldn't have any issue with a site
| like this linking users to purchase books from them.
| snthd wrote:
| Does this contribute to the internet archive's open library?
|
| https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/about#what
| greenie_beans wrote:
| cool, looks nice and easy to use. def gonna try out.
|
| but, this doesn't support indie bookstores if it's using a
| bookshop, unless it's the affiliate link for a specific
| bookstore. instead, it's likely an affiliate link for the creator
| of booqsi. if you're trying to let consumers support indie
| bookstores, then linking to indiebound with the isbn in the url
| will let them choose a local bookstore, and not booqsi's
| affiliate bookshop. example:
| https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196
|
| sorry, but as a former indie bookseller, i get bothered by these
| tech apps who link to their affiliate bookshop and try to sell
| themselves as helping out indie bookstores. they're not.
|
| edit: might be a cool feature for a user to choose their
| preferred indie to link to. if you did that, you could probably
| market it to the bookstores and they might want to use it too.
| criddell wrote:
| When you were a bookseller, why didn't you use bookshop.org? Is
| there some problem with it?
|
| All of the independent book stores that I know about around me
| are on there.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| I don't have a problem with a brick and mortar indie sharing
| a bookshop link to their own shop, because they get a cut
| from that transaction. I don't like it when a bookish SaaS
| app uses the bookshop affiliate thing and tries to market
| itself as a win for the independent stores, it seems a bit
| misleading to me.
|
| And when I was a bookseller, bookshop didn't exist except for
| an idea. I stopped working for the store right before it
| launched. I actually learned to code from doing a frontend
| redesign of my store's online store, which was offered by
| indie commerce. If done right, indie commerce can be a better
| deal for a bookstore because the store gets the full cut and
| just pays indie commerce a monthly subscription (at least
| when I was there, i think i've seen news of them changing
| their model or at least raising their subscription price).
| With indiecommerce, the store acts as a distributor (mostly,
| when the book is in stock at the store). Whereas bookshop
| doesn't use the bookstore's physical inventory, and instead
| ships directly from ingram (the monopolistic book
| distributor) and gives the bookstore a cut like an affiliate.
|
| Bookshop is not a bad deal for a smaller store without a lot
| of resources or staff, but it doesn't always let an indie do
| what an indie does best: sell some of their unique physical
| inventory, like signed or rare or small press books that
| aren't distributed by ingram.
| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| For less social readers, I find openlibrary good for tracking
| books I want to read.
|
| They have a lot of data, some a bit messy but the depth and
| breadth is insane. They link to scans of crazy old books, ebooks
| of the classics, are happy to link out to libraries etc. have
| lots of weird and wonderful old textbooks and have open APIs and
| silly amounts of open data for book geeks.
| skrbjc wrote:
| Interesting, but that name is cringey for some reason. I can't
| put my finger on it, but the way it looks and how it is said in
| my head, puts me off.
| sugaroverflow wrote:
| Booqsi looks really pretty and I love that it supports local
| bookstores! Are there plans to support imports from Goodreads? I
| know many people who have curated their shelves for years so that
| might be an important feature for them to switch over.
|
| I've been using and loving an alternative,
| https://www.thestorygraph.com/it has similar vibes to Booqsi and
| also includes a Goodreads import, AI based recommendations, and
| some mood-based book tracking (i.e tags like fast-paced, dark,
| emotional)
| scantron4 wrote:
| Storygraph also doesn't have an api, unfortunately. If they did
| I'd jump over wholeheartedly.
| hwers wrote:
| Are goodreads imports allowed? Isn't that kind of data
| sometimes against terms of service (for obvious anti-
| competitive reasons)?
| silas wrote:
| Goodreads allows you to export your library via CSV.
| justinberding wrote:
| Right, if the question is asking about exporting your book
| lists from Goodreads and then (eventually) importing them
| into Booqsi, that's definitely allowed.
| number6 wrote:
| GDPR demands a machine readable export of your data. You
| could import that and I can't see how this could violate any
| ToS.
| datashaman wrote:
| Just noting that GDPR is an EU law, not an international
| one.
| hwers wrote:
| Well I don't think importing tweets and displaying them is
| allowed by their ToS for instance (even though some apps
| do), nor instagram pics.
| dybber wrote:
| The user owns the data, not the platform. The data is
| just ISBN numbers, dates, review comments and so on
| anyway.
|
| It would probably be illegal to crawl Goodreads, if
| that's what you're thinking about?
| hwers wrote:
| I believe in some cases (e.g. instagram) the user
| agreement you sign when using the site makes your
| copyright over e.g. the pictures you upload be handed
| over to the site owners (again, to prevent competition).
| Just to point out that the common sense idea that "you
| own the data" thing isn't always true. Nevertheless this
| question has been resolved through other comments on here
| so it seems not to be the case in this scenario.
| justinberding wrote:
| Yes! We realized pretty quickly that we need a way to import
| booklists (specifically from Goodreads), so we're actively
| working on that! Should be rolled out soon.
|
| Yes, I've used StoryGraph as well, but felt like I needed
| something that provided a few more social features. The book
| mention feature of the social feed is one of my personal
| favorites with Booqsi.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm glad another site for book lovers exists, and I wish you
| well!
|
| But I think it's sad that Librarything has such poor marketing
| and branding that nobody ever thinks "well, there already is a
| better, cooler replacement for Goodreads, and it doesn't cost
| anything". It's been around for 17 years, has 2.6 million users,
| and very few people know about it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I always thought Librarything was also bought by Amazon.
|
| later: According to some pretty stale info on Wikipedia,
| Abebooks bought 40% of Librarything in 2006, and Amazon bought
| Abebooks entirely in 2008.
|
| edit: https://blog.librarything.com/2008/08/abebooks-news-the-
| scoo...
|
| https://www.librarything.com/topic/152033
|
| > At the same time, it's well known that Amazon has an indirect
| but real stake in LibraryThing--they bought Abebooks, who were
| our first minority partner. People keep reporting that Amazon
| has 40%. That's simply not true--it fails to take account of
| our second funder, Bowker. (I remain the majority; I can't say
| how the rest divides up.) But this certainly muddies the
| message. For what it's worth, I want LibraryThing to make more
| money, and therefore my, Bowker and Amazon's stake to be worth
| more and more, but with Amazon now holding 100% ownership of
| BOTH our competitors (Goodreads and Shelfari), we can hardly do
| so without emphasizing what sets us apart.
| arawde wrote:
| I think the reason is that LibraryThing is significantly less
| UX-friendly than Goodreads. I use both; I use Goodreads to
| track what I consider "personal" reading, and I use
| LibraryThing to track what I consider "technical", but the big
| reason I have it broken down like this is because LibraryThing
| is just not as friendly to a user as the alternatives.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Agreed. The name "LibraryThing" is like a people-repellent
| compared to "GoodReads." Names matter.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| thx! - all I knew before today was to avoid Goodreads at all
| costs! my "cookie counters" went off the charts at Goodreads -
| I literally will not open a page there for any reason now..
| same with that ubiquitous picture-collecting site.. pinterest..
| toxic to me now.
| rsolva wrote:
| I use BookWyrm [0], which is not only social but decentralized
| (ActivityPub) and thus interoperable with other social networks
| like Mastodon. It's nothing fancy, it just works and it is nice
| to be able to follow (or share) quotes or reviews on books within
| the Fediverse.
|
| [0] https://joinbookwyrm.com/
| lf-non wrote:
| As someone who has occasionally dabbled with fediverse, but
| never quite dived in, I have always found federated
| applications to be confusing from UX pov.
|
| In this case, what does interoperability mean ? When I sign up
| for the service I see options to create profile with one of the
| instances - how to choose an instance is not very obvious from
| that page. Some instances have specific themes, others don't -
| should I choose based on how much my interest overlaps ? Based
| on reputation of who runs those instances ? What are the
| consequences if I make the wrong choice ?
|
| Also, If I already have a mastodon account I can supposedly use
| that to participate in the discussions on BookWyrm. However I
| have no clue how to actually do that - any attempt to
| comment/like posts takes me to a login page which doesn't seem
| to have any support for connecting to Mastodon.
|
| Until the UX improves for me to be able to make these kind of
| choices in a very short amount of time, I am more inclined to
| pick a traditional sign up and start using kind of service -
| and I'd assume I am not the only one.
| finnh wrote:
| +1 to importing from Goodreads (and, also, from my Amazon digital
| content list aka kindle-purchased books). I'm happy to go through
| an export/import cycle for these, but starting from scratch on
| booqsi without a bootstrap sets the bar too high.
|
| And I agree 100% with your core sentiment: Goodreads is weirdly
| low-value.
| justinberding wrote:
| Definitely a must. We're working on it; stay tuned!
| seaman1921 wrote:
| > if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that
| it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting.
|
| Sorry, not sold.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| I applaud the effort! The "Amazon-free" part is attractive,
| considering that many of us feel that Amazon's business practices
| are abusive of employees, anti-competitive, and unethical in
| other ways.
|
| I have stopped using Goodreads already--probably for a couple
| years now. I found that the only feature I really used was the
| "To read" bookshelf. And I found that I just replaced it with a
| specific "To read" list of reminders in my iPhone's Reminders
| app. For that use case, this seems to work great for me. Can you
| speak to potentially any features of Booqsi that would be an
| improvement over my simple / non-book-specific approach?
| justinberding wrote:
| Thanks! Yes, having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of
| the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first place.
|
| You're not the first to use their Reminders (or Notes) app for
| book lists. If you're not interested in the social elements of
| Booqsi and just want to improve upon your current approach, a
| couple thoughts come to mind:
|
| 1. it's built specifically for books (unlike the Reminders
| app), so you'll be able to easily search for and add books to
| your "To read" shelf with the option to then "mark is as read"
| when you finished it, making it easy to track that aspect of
| your reading journey as well.
|
| 2. if you choose to buy it, it'll link you directly to
| bookshop.org to purchase it from a local bookstore instead of
| Amazon.
|
| Now, if you wanted to elevate your experience, I feel like the
| social aspects of Booqsi is where it shines. For example:
|
| 1. if a friend drops you a book recommendation, it'll
| automatically add that book to your Books Recommended to Me
| shelf. If you like that book, you can move it to your "to read"
| shelf, or just go buy it. I've found it makes tracking book
| recs so much easier.
|
| 2. anytime someone in your community mentions a book, it'll
| come through your feed; you can then easily take action from it
| by navigating to the book's info page, adding to a shelf, going
| to purchase it, etc.
|
| Those are just a few that come to mind! Regardless of if you
| want to use the site independently of others or engage more
| socially with others, there's something for everyone.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| That actually sounds really cool! I'm signed up and will be
| trying it out. Thanks!
| stolenmerch wrote:
| I seem to be one of the few people here who likes Goodreads and
| uses it daily. I have no compelling reason to switch, but Booqsi
| looks gorgeous and fast, so I was interested in trying it out. I
| know it's early days, but a few things stand out.
|
| Overall, the data seems a bit messy. I tried adding a few books
| from my currently reading list on Goodreads and ran into some
| problems. The first book I tried to add had a duplicate entry.
| Both had identical metadata but are separate records; if I marked
| one as finished it didn't update the other. Many books seem to be
| missing editions, alternate covers, subtitles, and other
| important details. Other times multiple editions seem to be split
| out as separate titles but with no clue to edition. This gets
| confusing fast for certain types of books.
|
| It seems difficult to find people to follow. Everything looks to
| be private by default so I couldn't find people based on the
| books they read. The "people who read it" feature does not seem
| to work as expected. It seems it doesn't include books currently
| being read or books simply put on a favorite shelf without
| marking it 'read' - either that or I'm locked out of seeing what
| people I don't follow are reading. I have to follow them first?
| As it stands, I don't know anyone personally on Booqsi, so I'm
| relying on following interesting strangers based on reading
| habits, which I can't seem to do. It's doubtful my friends who
| already don't use Goodreads very much are going to switch, so I'm
| looking for Booqsi to be more like a "twitter for books", which
| it currently isn't without the option to be public.
|
| A couple more books didn't exist and I didn't see an option to
| add it. I assume some crowdsourcing option like Goodreads is on
| the roadmap for Booqsi though.
| Pacers31Colts18 wrote:
| Our security software flags this as malware (Cisco Umbrella)
| qnsi wrote:
| This is such a fashionable problem. There are startups /
| indiehackers trying to solve this every month.
| justinberding wrote:
| The problem we're trying to solve is that existing book
| platforms don't provide the social features many book lovers
| are looking for and/or are archaically designed. The Amazon-
| less part is a bonus.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Impressive! It's a lot of work building a product like that.
|
| Please support export of a user's data. I just lost all of my
| Goodreads data when some system problem of their's deleted all my
| data. I'm pretty mad about it, but at least I had a data export
| from eight months ago so not all is lost.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503465
| justinberding wrote:
| Sorry to hear that you lost all of your data. That's rough.
| We're starting first with an import feature so that you can
| move all of your data into Booqsi, but an export feature is a
| natural follower to that. You should see both before too long!
| dybber wrote:
| Yet another alternative: https://www.booksloth.com/
|
| What is your plan for monetization? I'm currently using
| StoryGraph and it seems it will survive through paid users, but
| I'm uncertain whether a site like yours will continue very long
| unless you start monetizing it.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| The reason I use Goodreads is to get publicly stated opinions on
| books, not for a social community. This is not an alternative to
| Goodreads for people like me at all.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Can't see the site without sign in = I'm not going to sign up
| just to see your platform for the first time. Not a great
| impression.
| johnymontana wrote:
| Looks neat - congrats on the launch!
|
| Could you give a high-level overview of the tech stack? I'm
| specifically curious how you work with the social graph data
| aspects and approaches to generating recommendations.
| bobbytuck wrote:
| Meh.
|
| Reading is a personal experience. I guess I understand the desire
| to make it more social -- but I'm not sure why I would go to the
| lengths to do so.
|
| Is it some kind of gamification thing? I guess that's why I never
| got into Goodreads either.
|
| I might be an outlier -- but I've never seen reading --
| authentic, personal reading -- as anything other than personal.
|
| I'm a social creature for sure, but I don't feel the need to
| share my reading lists. I always feel like social media is for
| creating a persona -- someone who want to be but aren't -- but
| want your "friends" to think you are.
|
| This seems like it veers that way -- but I don't know. I didn't
| sign up -- but I was (obviously) curious enough to take a peek.
| And that probably says more about me than I care to acknowledge.
| :(
| justinberding wrote:
| I agree, reading by nature is very personal. Have you tried
| reading when you're surrounded by a group of friends talking?
| Yeah, hard to do. Doesn't really work.
|
| But, where I've found the "social" element being important is
| more in helping me to determine what to read next (like a
| friend recommending a book to me), discussing books with others
| or sharing something interesting about what I'm reading, seeing
| what my friend's of family's all-time favorites are, etc.
|
| The interaction comes in-between reading sessions and has
| greatly enhanced my enjoyment of books.
| kome wrote:
| An alternative to Goodreads is https://www.anobii.com
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