3 ms·
Ask HN: Any interest in a startup book review site?
(Treat this as a customer discovery phase)
After searching for some non-trivial amount of time I have yet to find a good review site/blog that caters to books of interest to the start up community. Since we're always strapped for time, I wonder whether it would help to create a site that would serve as a hub for these book reviews.
The core value here isn't just the reviews themselves but other related resources - TED talks, slides, HN discussion threads, case studies, links to "I used the advice in this book and this was my experience" articles, etc.
A peripheral value here is this site/blog would be indexed, categorized and of course searchable.
- revorad 16y agohttp://hn-books.com http://hn-books.com is on the same lines.
- prassarkar 16y agoThanks, I hadn't come across that in my search. That site seems to solve the problem of finding book recommendations in a way that's easily filtered/sorted. I like the fact that it lists additional versions (ebook, pdf, etc.) of the book. My thoughts were that the community might want to read reviews from a startup-oriented individual rather than the default synopsis from the book's publisher. I also imagined that multiple reviewers could review the same book (either on the hub site or their own blog).
- revorad 16y agoDanielBMarkham, who runs hn books does write reviews as well. Letting users review would probably be a nice addition. Since you are going down the lean path, presumably you want to make money from this. How will you do that?
- prassarkar 16y agoI wasn't exactly looking to make it a business but enough money to cover operational costs. The revenue could be a mix of affiliate links + Adsense (kept to a minimal). The focus here is to create a community-focused treasure trove of startup knowledge rather than a page-view focused content site.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoWe already have hn-books.com and, IIRC, at least one competitor. The transparent commerciality (bit.ly -> Amazon affiliate links) turns me off, but others may think otherwise.
- neuroelectronic 16y agoYeah, not sure why people have objection to this. It's not like they are affected. Sure, it reveals a motivation that otherwise might not be there, but everyone has hidden motivations.
- droz 16y agohttp://www.goodreads.com/ http://www.goodreads.com/ already exists. It simply lacks a strong HN-focused community. As others pointed out, we also have hn-books.com.
- swanson 16y agohttp://www.hackerbooks.com/book/learning-python-3rd-edition/0596513984 http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/learning-python-3rd-edition/... http://bibliotechnical.com/books/learning-python http://bibliotechnical.com/books/learning-python I made the latter; the problem I ran into was generating quality reviews and related information. I found it was going to take a lot of manual curation to get good results. HN is also a tough crowd for this kind of project, I think you would be more profitable trying to optimize for people searching for 'java book' instead of those looking for the 'best java book given that I know how to program and know these other languages'.