7 ms·

Show HN: Kooba, an interactive graph for finding new books

145 points by cloudbeary 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Exuma 9y ago
Never loaded...
- randcraw 9y ago
  It loads but it doesn't respond when I type in a title. Just three reddish disks that blink forever.
  - phusion 9y ago
    Same... typed in a book title in a couple different browsers, just the red dots appear :/
breck 9y ago
This looks awesome. Look forwarding to using it but right now getting some errors in the console. Maybe load problems?
cloudbeary 9y ago
Hey! Wanted to let you guys know that we use Amazon data and currently the Amazon API limits the request rate so that if there's multiple concurrent visitors it might be temporarily delayed. Working on fixing it now!
- jszymborski 9y ago
  Rate-limiting task queue and aggressive caching might help out... "Shown HN" loosely translates to "DDoS Me" :P
- herlitzj 9y ago
  Yeah, at the very least slap a leaky bucket on there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket Also, a user navigating to /search/:title is currently shown a raw error .json that exposes both your HMAC signature and your AWS access ID
trowawee 9y ago
Interesting concept, and a really fun interface. The main issue I'm seeing is that the suggestions being surfaced are too close to what I've already selected - i.e., once I've indicated that I've read one or two of the books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, it should probably downrank the others, because while they are similar, it is likely that someone who's indicated they liked two of them has already read the others. There also seems to be an issue where the list of recommendations on the right still contains some of the books I've already liked.
- cloudbeary 9y ago
  Yes, totally agree! We're going to make adjustments to the algorithm so that books by the same author show up less (obviously if I'm searching for Harry Potter I'm probably not looking to be recommended six other J.K. Rowling books).
  - herlitzj 9y ago
    Is this just an item-item collaborative filter based on star ratings and cosine distance or do you have something more sophisticated going on?
spearmint 9y ago
I gave it "A Storm of Swords" by GRRM and it gave me the rest of the books in the series + Fellowship of the Ring. Yeah, thanks.
bradleyjg 9y ago
I'm still playing with it because of the, completely understandable, technical problems. But initial comments: 1) Love the idea, I'm always struggling to find the next book to read. 2) It seems to be pulling some scam books, I put East of Eden in and got some sort of help you with your homework summary book. 3) I'd echo the suggestion to deemphasize other books by the same author. If I loved Foucault's Pendulum, I almost certainly already know about In the Name of the Rose.
yuchi 9y ago
Suggestion: cancel pending requests when another one is requested.
- Scriptor 9y ago
  On top of that, maybe only send requests when a user hits enter or submits the form. Could ease up the load a bit. As of right now I am unable to get anything to happen.
BeetleB 9y ago
Would really like a way to import books from my LibraryThing profile. I have too many to add manually.
hxn 9y ago
Reminds me of http://www.literature-map.com http://www.literature-map.com
aaachilless 9y ago
Do many people have a hard time finding books to read? I have the exact opposite problem: I'm constantly overwhelmed by the tidal wave of books that is my to-read list. I'd give my right arm to be able to read 2x as fast as I do today.
- breck 9y ago
  There's always a tradeoff between reading the next best book in your queue versus spending time sorting what the next best book would be. I certainly don't have the problem of not having a long queue of books to read, but always want ways to improve my sorting algo. I expect this might help me find lookalike books similar to my favorites, that might be more worthwhile for me to read versus my current queue.
  - aaachilless 9y ago
    I see what you mean. Something I've been doing recently to help with that problem is reading clusters of books that all relate to each other. For example, I'm currently reading a bunch of Hemingway's stories and next I'm gonna read a bunch of books centered on the American Revolution and the founding fathers. By clustering books the list I have to sort is much smaller.
- lfowles 9y ago
  Despite having a formidable Mount TBR, I occasionally branch off into a genre I have barely touched and would like to read more of that genre (example I'm thinking of is horror after reading 14/The Fold). My to be read list is not a guidance, but a fallback :)
- zokier 9y ago
  Its a classic case of paradox of choice; having too much options makes it more difficult to pick any single one of them. The problem is not that I have hard time finding good books. I have hard time selecting which of the thousands of good books I want to read.
- newsbinator 9y ago
  Reading the wrong books is worse than reading no books at all. Any tool that allows you to avoid 10% of the wrong books is worth it.
k__ 9y ago
503 (Service Unavailable) Guess HN killed it :\
- donatj 9y ago
  Suffers from my biggest complaint about modern JS applications as well: The assumption that the server is infallible. The progress bar simply never goes away and my console is full of 503's. I sat waiting for like 30-40 seconds before I decided to check. Give me an error message so I know something went wrong at the very least!
aesthetics1 9y ago
When I click a details link, it sends me to the Canadian Amazon link. Any way to fix that? Looks neat otherwise.
- cloudbeary 9y ago
  Going to switch it to amazon.com!
qrv3w 9y ago
Cool! I actually made a book recommendation service as well. [1] Its been indispensable for me, gives me much better recommendations than friends/Amazon/Goodreads give me. I've found Library at Mount Char and Hard Magic because I wanted something similar to Weaveworld [2] and both those have been perfect. I'm only two months into using it, but I feel like I have a never-ending reading list now! I look forward to trying yours when it is back online (service was disrupted when I tried). [1] https://www.booksuggestions.ninja/ https://www.booksuggestions.ninja/ [2] https://rpiai.com/why-i-made-a-book-recommendation-service/ https://rpiai.com/why-i-made-a-book-recommendation-service/
- Jemaclus 9y ago
  Library at Mount Char was reeeeally disturbing. Good, but ye gads... not what I was expecting... :)
  - qrv3w 9y ago
    Its funny, I was sort of expecting something disturbing because I got the recommendation through Weaveworld.
- kovek 9y ago
  I really like your blog post because it covers all the important and interesting parts concisely. It seems like the same can be said about other content on your website. I'll read more of it!
ospohngellert 9y ago
I am wondering what api you used for book search, as I am currently thinking of undertaking a project involving books. Thanks :)
noufalibrahim 9y ago
This is beautifully done. I'm happy about your successful implementation and half annoyed that now, I'm going to get even more books in my "to read" list. :-| Back when I worked on openlibrary, we had something called "subjects" (e.g. https://openlibrary.org/subjects/architecture https://openlibrary.org/subjects/architecture) and at the bottom, it would give out "Related..." books (by subject, place etc.). It was an extremely simple algorithm but gave me quite some nice things to follow. Good work!
DomreiRoam 9y ago
If you're ready to invest some time www.librarything.com allows you to catalog your books and then gives you recommendations. Still I hope to see Kooba working to find other books to add to my reading list :)
daviesgeek 9y ago
I would love to see this work better on mobile. I'm not sure if it's just not working due to the rate limiting but it's not really working for me (Safari, iPhone 6, iOS 10)
labso 9y ago
As many have said here, finding books is easy, finding good books in a particular niche is hard. For me using this tool gave few new books to my reading list. As a side note, I an quite social reader and like to read books that I can have conversations about. Amazon ratings etc. are quite good in that already, but the visualization helps big time.
FourSigma 9y ago
Can anyone comment on the benefits of using the Goodreads API vs Amazon?

145 points by cloudbeary 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Exuma 9y ago

Never loaded...

randcraw 9y ago
It loads but it doesn't respond when I type in a title. Just three reddish disks that blink forever.
- phusion 9y ago
  Same... typed in a book title in a couple different browsers, just the red dots appear :/

breck 9y ago

This looks awesome. Look forwarding to using it but right now getting some errors in the console. Maybe load problems?

cloudbeary 9y ago

Hey! Wanted to let you guys know that we use Amazon data and currently the Amazon API limits the request rate so that if there's multiple concurrent visitors it might be temporarily delayed. Working on fixing it now!

jszymborski 9y ago
Rate-limiting task queue and aggressive caching might help out... "Shown HN" loosely translates to "DDoS Me" :P
herlitzj 9y ago
Yeah, at the very least slap a leaky bucket on there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket Also, a user navigating to /search/:title is currently shown a raw error .json that exposes both your HMAC signature and your AWS access ID

trowawee 9y ago

Interesting concept, and a really fun interface. The main issue I'm seeing is that the suggestions being surfaced are too close to what I've already selected - i.e., once I've indicated that I've read one or two of the books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, it should probably downrank the others, because while they are similar, it is likely that someone who's indicated they liked two of them has already read the others. There also seems to be an issue where the list of recommendations on the right still contains some of the books I've already liked.

cloudbeary 9y ago
Yes, totally agree! We're going to make adjustments to the algorithm so that books by the same author show up less (obviously if I'm searching for Harry Potter I'm probably not looking to be recommended six other J.K. Rowling books).
- herlitzj 9y ago
  Is this just an item-item collaborative filter based on star ratings and cosine distance or do you have something more sophisticated going on?

spearmint 9y ago

I gave it "A Storm of Swords" by GRRM and it gave me the rest of the books in the series + Fellowship of the Ring. Yeah, thanks.

bradleyjg 9y ago

I'm still playing with it because of the, completely understandable, technical problems. But initial comments: 1) Love the idea, I'm always struggling to find the next book to read. 2) It seems to be pulling some scam books, I put East of Eden in and got some sort of help you with your homework summary book. 3) I'd echo the suggestion to deemphasize other books by the same author. If I loved Foucault's Pendulum, I almost certainly already know about In the Name of the Rose.

yuchi 9y ago

Suggestion: cancel pending requests when another one is requested.

Scriptor 9y ago
On top of that, maybe only send requests when a user hits enter or submits the form. Could ease up the load a bit. As of right now I am unable to get anything to happen.

BeetleB 9y ago

Would really like a way to import books from my LibraryThing profile. I have too many to add manually.

hxn 9y ago

Reminds me of http://www.literature-map.com http://www.literature-map.com

aaachilless 9y ago

Do many people have a hard time finding books to read? I have the exact opposite problem: I'm constantly overwhelmed by the tidal wave of books that is my to-read list. I'd give my right arm to be able to read 2x as fast as I do today.

breck 9y ago
There's always a tradeoff between reading the next best book in your queue versus spending time sorting what the next best book would be. I certainly don't have the problem of not having a long queue of books to read, but always want ways to improve my sorting algo. I expect this might help me find lookalike books similar to my favorites, that might be more worthwhile for me to read versus my current queue.
- aaachilless 9y ago
  I see what you mean. Something I've been doing recently to help with that problem is reading clusters of books that all relate to each other. For example, I'm currently reading a bunch of Hemingway's stories and next I'm gonna read a bunch of books centered on the American Revolution and the founding fathers. By clustering books the list I have to sort is much smaller.
lfowles 9y ago
Despite having a formidable Mount TBR, I occasionally branch off into a genre I have barely touched and would like to read more of that genre (example I'm thinking of is horror after reading 14/The Fold). My to be read list is not a guidance, but a fallback :)
zokier 9y ago
Its a classic case of paradox of choice; having too much options makes it more difficult to pick any single one of them. The problem is not that I have hard time finding good books. I have hard time selecting which of the thousands of good books I want to read.
newsbinator 9y ago
Reading the wrong books is worse than reading no books at all. Any tool that allows you to avoid 10% of the wrong books is worth it.

k__ 9y ago

503 (Service Unavailable) Guess HN killed it :\

donatj 9y ago
Suffers from my biggest complaint about modern JS applications as well: The assumption that the server is infallible. The progress bar simply never goes away and my console is full of 503's. I sat waiting for like 30-40 seconds before I decided to check. Give me an error message so I know something went wrong at the very least!

aesthetics1 9y ago

When I click a details link, it sends me to the Canadian Amazon link. Any way to fix that? Looks neat otherwise.

cloudbeary 9y ago
Going to switch it to amazon.com!

qrv3w 9y ago

Cool! I actually made a book recommendation service as well. [1] Its been indispensable for me, gives me much better recommendations than friends/Amazon/Goodreads give me. I've found Library at Mount Char and Hard Magic because I wanted something similar to Weaveworld [2] and both those have been perfect. I'm only two months into using it, but I feel like I have a never-ending reading list now! I look forward to trying yours when it is back online (service was disrupted when I tried). [1] https://www.booksuggestions.ninja/ https://www.booksuggestions.ninja/ [2] https://rpiai.com/why-i-made-a-book-recommendation-service/ https://rpiai.com/why-i-made-a-book-recommendation-service/

Jemaclus 9y ago
Library at Mount Char was reeeeally disturbing. Good, but ye gads... not what I was expecting... :)
- qrv3w 9y ago
  Its funny, I was sort of expecting something disturbing because I got the recommendation through Weaveworld.
kovek 9y ago
I really like your blog post because it covers all the important and interesting parts concisely. It seems like the same can be said about other content on your website. I'll read more of it!

ospohngellert 9y ago

I am wondering what api you used for book search, as I am currently thinking of undertaking a project involving books. Thanks :)

noufalibrahim 9y ago

This is beautifully done. I'm happy about your successful implementation and half annoyed that now, I'm going to get even more books in my "to read" list. :-| Back when I worked on openlibrary, we had something called "subjects" (e.g. https://openlibrary.org/subjects/architecture https://openlibrary.org/subjects/architecture) and at the bottom, it would give out "Related..." books (by subject, place etc.). It was an extremely simple algorithm but gave me quite some nice things to follow. Good work!

DomreiRoam 9y ago

If you're ready to invest some time www.librarything.com allows you to catalog your books and then gives you recommendations. Still I hope to see Kooba working to find other books to add to my reading list :)

daviesgeek 9y ago

I would love to see this work better on mobile. I'm not sure if it's just not working due to the rate limiting but it's not really working for me (Safari, iPhone 6, iOS 10)

labso 9y ago

As many have said here, finding books is easy, finding good books in a particular niche is hard. For me using this tool gave few new books to my reading list. As a side note, I an quite social reader and like to read books that I can have conversations about. Amazon ratings etc. are quite good in that already, but the visualization helps big time.

FourSigma 9y ago

Can anyone comment on the benefits of using the Goodreads API vs Amazon?