This is really helpful, thank you! It's been mentioned before here, but what are your plans for privacy/monetization? Also (out of curiosity) where are you getting the book data from? It's pretty exhaustive and fast, but the only problem is that it doesn't prioritize the "real" version of the book (ie when I start typing Fahrenheit 451, the actual book is further down and stuff like the cliffnotes version or literary analyses come up first).
Hey Aninuth, co-creator Joe here! Thanks for all the comments. Will try to respond to all of them below
1) Privacy / Monetization: We're big believers that users should own their own data. We have no plans to sell your data to anyone. In terms of monetization, there are several approaches. We can add affiliate links to all books on bookshelves. We can build a freemium model. We can have authors promote books. The list goes on. For now we aren't focusing on monetization -- but rather focusing on building an awesome product that gives people what they actually want :)
2) Source of data. For now we are using Google Books api!
3) Thanks for the feedback re: ordering. We'll keep this mind and think about how we can improve our search results.
Appreciate the response and love the product! I've tried multiple alternatives to Goodreads for organizing my books and have resigned myself to spreadsheets; really hoping this turns into something mainstream. Best of luck!
It's one of the best ones we've tried so far. The upsides: great content, easy API. The downsides: you need to ask permission to increase rate limits, and it doesn't have books that are only available on Amazon Kindle.
Once I signed in, I got this paragraph on my profile:
> Welcome to your Library! Once you start creating bookshelves and adding books, they will show up here! Until then here's some helpful information on how to build your library. From the library edit page you can create bookshelves and add books.
I really like this! I'm going to build my library soon. I was totally sold at the idea of finding one place to see the Bill Gates or the Naval recommended lists.
I started building something similar with Django for fun a while back.
What made you choose the Google Books API?
Are you cacheing anything?
Some comments/requests/suggestions (from a goodreads user):
* For me the main benefit of goodreads is their book suggestions. From what I can tell it's pretty naive but being able to see suggestions that I might enjoy based on my reading history, and also being able to see suggested books based on a single book or author is amazing.
* Read dates (and support for multiple read throughs) would be important to make the move from goodreads.
* Shelfs are nice but it's not clear what they are meant to be used for. I probably would create shelfs for the different genres I read, but then I'm missing a way to split the books in want-to-read/read/reading/gave-up.
* The shelf ui is pretty but not very useful. An option for a grid with filters or search would be nice.
* A good API would be AMAZING. More than amazing actually.
* Monetisation wise, affiliate link to amazon should be a good first way to keep you interested in improving zeneca. I'd say just add it.
* Public roadmap would be great with a way to subscribe for monthly feature updates or something.
I love this idea! One of the main use cases I would like to see would be sharing a direct link to a collection. It would be nice to be able to build a collection and link directly to just that collection. Additionally, having the ability to add a public description for each book in a collection would be really nice since you could use that to provide additional context.
Linkable book shelves: Noting this! We'll prioritize
Description for a book: Right now, there's a kind of hack you can do: if you write a "thought" about a book, it will show up on your book page too. We're thinking about some kind of "pin a thought as a description" feature -- that should be on it's way too!
Nice work! This looks like an interesting product.
I was trying to create a bookshelf with a bunch of books I liked. I have a strong aversion to manual work, and didn't want to continue after a few books because it took multiple seconds to add a book. In case you are interested in users like me this might help:
- Allow selecting multiple books in 1 search results
- Don't show books that are already in the shelf in the search results
- Make the search prompt blazing fast so that there is no waiting between multiple books
- This is a bit far fetched but if I could enter a list of books and the best matching results would be added automatically that would be very cool
Also I think something goes wrong if you change the name of 1 shelf into a name which is already the name of another shelf. (I was adding books to the wrong shelf and wanted to switch the names, I think the shelves got linked somehow)
<rant>
I'm not going to give you MY content, for free, if you don't AT LEAST allow for my content, and the content of my peers on your website, to be in a format which is easy to export and edit.
You know why?
Because in a couple of years you will raise more money, and your VC will tell you that a subscription business is a great idea, you will follow him, and I will need to decide between paying you $X per month, or stop using the service. I don't want to get there again.
</rant>
Nothing against you personally. But perhaps there's a way to promise potential customers that you're not going to screw them eventually.
Edit: to be clear, a "format which is easy to export and edit" means two things: something like markdown, and a single button which allows me to download everything I ever wrote on your website.
For what it's worth -- we definitely plan on making it easy to export and delete your data. While this feature is on the way, you can always ping us, and we can send you a data structure of your data, or delete it.
Mostly what the parent commenter has said. In fact anywhere where I'd put my effort and add content for free I'd only start using that service as a creator/contributor when these are parts of the feature set and T&C:
- you'd let users easily export and delete their data/account
- that you'd give users time to export their data in an easily readable format and also delete their account (with assurance that data will actually be deleted), if you are planning something that might change these possibilities -- a sale, a VC thingie
- you'd give this option in the UI/app itself and not via an email or support request
Till then, I'd either not use the service or just use as a parasite.
Bitter experiences and all that.
--
I like the font. However, the UI feels more like a blog, and it's not intuitive to me what I want to do with it.
UX is clunky on Firefox with default uBlockOrigin turned on. And yes, no way to delete the account. Well..
I did mention GDPR in another comment. Data extraction/portability is a 'thing' in GDPR.
There is a website that has the same function, but for movies. Apologies I cannot remember the name. Similar funciton. You record the titles of the movies you watched.
Thinking about this again (and this is why in my other comment I ask "who pays for this/how is that paid for"; this would be goldmine for Amazon, B&N, and other players.
Just skimmed through the website and it looks like a good idea. I’d recommend spell/grammar-checking the copy. People who love books are more likely to notice these sorts of things.
This is a great idea and site looks really nice. If you don't mind me asking, how did you get the book data with book images. ?. I too want to build on an idea involving books.
Looks interesting, but is there anyway to import books? I have everything on goodreads (which offers a csv export). No way I'm re-adding hundreds of books by hand.
We left our jobs in June last year to build a company together (but we didn’t have an idea… yet!). Since then we’ve shipped several projects. Our criteria for each project was 1) it had to be something we wanted for ourselves and 2) each project had to be more ambitious than the previous.
One day, Joe said that he wanted to share his favorite books online, but found most places did not do this in an elegant way. We noticed that the people we admired used plain lists on their personal websites, rather than Goodreads.
So we thought, hey, surely this can’t be the best way to do things. Maybe there’s a space here to fill what’s missing. From there, we built a static version of the site, and shared it with our friends: https://zeneca.io/joe + https://zeneca.io/stopa
This got enough interest, that we coded up the backend, so anyone could create public book pages. So far, 300 people have created their own public book pages.
Once book pages were in, more ideas start to sprout. We try to discuss books all over the place: from twitter comments to sparse reddit groups. What if there was a place just for this? You could find like-minded readers, have deeper discussions, and save all those conversations. When you wanted to share a book with a friend, they'd be able to "see" your experience of going through it.
To support that, we introduced quotes and thoughts. You can write thoughts about your favorite books, and they'll show up on your public page. Others can send you super cute hearts.
This is still very rough. We want to hack together more features, that can help you really engage with books. One thing we hope, is to siphon time off of Twitter and FB, and move it to something much more enriching: discussing and exploring favorite books.
Please try it out, we'd appreciate your feedback : )
---
For the technically curious, the site was all built in Clojure. It's been a joy to use. One surprise for us, was just how powerful Postgres is. Coming from big companies, it's easy to move towards more complicated setups -- however Postgres does a phenomenal job of helping you handle a few users without getting in your way, and going much further.
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
I LOVE the idea!! (as long as you don't become the next FB and sell-off everything you can collect:) it's a very useful tool to find more good reads and
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?
Co-creator Joe here! Thanks for all the questions! Will try to address each one point by point below
1) Initially we went with magic links because we thought that would be a better UX. It's been surprising and amusing to see how much feedback we get on this. We hear you loud and clear and will budget some time to move auth from magic links to passwords / o-auth
2) Privacy settings make sense! We'll be baking this in the near future :)
3) Comments and discussion are coming soon!
In terms of paying -- Stopa and I are both running on our savings for now :) Our main focus is to build something awesome that we ourselves love and other people want. Assuming we succeed at that, when the time for monetization comes we will never sell user data (this is a first principle for us).
Prior to this Show HN we hadn't gotten any feedback re: adding a privacy policy -- we hear you loud and clear and will add that in. For GDPR, we are big believers that users should own their own data and will build out data export and account deletion features in the future.
One thought I had (disclaimer: I am not looking for a date!!!!)(for now!). I also see this as an opportunity to "meet like-minded people in your area". I remember back in the day where ICQ had a 'search' mode. Imagine I can pick 10 books that someone (m/f/...) has read in my area. I am not suggesting your make this a dating site, but for introverts/avid readers it wouldn't surprise me if people would be paying attention to that.
Perhaps a setting that would add the location "Henry" versus "Henry (London, UK)". Feel free to add this on the "never do" list :)
We have indeed been hearing people ask for self-reporting gender and location! And indeed books are a great way to connect with others. Thanks for the feedback, we're taking note! Please feel free to share more ideas :)
I signed up and started playing around with it, and I think it looks promising.
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 https://www.zeneca.io/<username>, 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.
This is such awesome feedback! Thank you for taking the time to go so deep geraltofrivia
Privacy Policy: Hear you loud and clear. We'll prioritize this
Monetization: Both of us believe users should own their data, and we would reject any monetization that would involve selling data. There are some paths we're considering (freemium, community memberships, working with authors), but our first priority, is to make something people actually use.
Export: Heck yeah. We'll prioritize this. In the meantime, if you need to export data, send a ping and we'll do it manually
1) - 5) We'll fast follow on all of these -- excellent points!
Great idea and I like the simple design.
Have you thought about integrating with different readers/highlighters (Kindle, Pocket, etc.) so users could import their highlights to your service?
Wow, it's going to take some work to get your name out from under the SEO shadow of AstraZeneca, and considering their COVID-19 vaccine, uh, I'd change my name.
