8 ms·

Show HN: Zeneca – Share and discuss your favorite books

70 points by stopachka 6y ago

Jzeitz 6y ago
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?
stopachka 6y ago
Hey HN, We're Joe & Stopa, from https://zeneca.io https://zeneca.io. We're building the successor to Goodreads. For now, you can create public bookshelves (i.e https://zeneca.io/stopa https://zeneca.io/stopa), discover like-minded readers, and share your favorite quotes and thoughts (i.e here's all I learned from PG: https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ) 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/joe + https://zeneca.io/stopa 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.
- geraltofrivia 6y ago
  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 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/ 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 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> 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.
ilolu 6y ago
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.
- nezaj 6y ago
  Thanks for the kind words ilolu! We used Google Books API
aninuth 6y ago
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).
- nezaj 6y ago
  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.
  - aninuth 6y ago
    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!
  - loosetypes 6y ago
    Interesting. How have you found the Google Books api so far?
    - stopachka 6y ago
      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.
baumandm 6y ago
This is great! I love the aesthetics and I've been waiting years for someone to provide a viable alternative to Goodreads.
- stopachka 6y ago
  Brought a smile to read, thank you baumandm!
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Great idea! But, <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.
- vladsanchez 6y ago
  I concur and support you! It will play out like that.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  Likewise, I don’t see this working for me in a few years time. Are there compelling reasons to use this today if I hope to use it in 5 years? This is why I generally only use things online that I can pay for, these days. It tends to ensure some degree of longer term service.
- stopachka 6y ago
  Fair concern Simone, 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.
  - crossroadsguy 6y ago
    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..
vladsanchez 6y ago
Congrats on your launch! I once had a similar idea for which I registered but never actioned thereadinglog.com. Fear of Failure! :facepalm:
- stopachka 6y ago
  Cheers Vlad! And definitely empathize, re: fear of failure
throw0932439 6y ago
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.
- stopachka 6y ago
  Goodreads import is on the way! If you like, feel free to email us (stopa@js.ventures), and you'll be one of the first to try it!
pronoiac 6y ago
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.
- stopachka 6y ago
  We really like the name, so we are debating whether we should also make a COVID-19 vaccine, to have a fair shot with them xD (Jokes aside, indeed, something we'll have to figure out soon)
  - fakedang 6y ago
    How about Cizero? /s
dstaley 6y ago
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.
- stopachka 6y ago
  Great points dstaley! 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! Here's to iterating : )
agustif 6y ago
I've had a similar idea like this but mainly for movies, anyone would dig it?
- GoshaLevin 6y ago
  It would be great! I would enjoy knowing what my friends watch and how they rank the movies.
gnicholas 6y ago
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.
- nezaj 6y ago
  Took another pass and made some fixes -- thanks for pointing this out!
lkbm 6y ago
Quick note, since I don't see a contact form: 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. "library edit page" is a link to https://www.zeneca.io/edit https://www.zeneca.io/edit -- which is a 404.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  I also had this experience - noting it in case the developers would like to know.
- nezaj 6y ago
  Fixed! Thanks for letting us know :) We'll add that contact form too!
perryizgr8 6y ago
Just thought I'd let you know that your sign in email is landing up in the junk folder in outlook.
- nezaj 6y ago
  Oof was not aware! Thanks for letting us know!
cluelessmaker 6y ago
Interesting name :)
geoah 6y ago
Congrats on the launch! 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.
- geoah 6y ago
  Also, was looking at the PUT /library request being made when you add a book. The body looks really weird, is that some weird framework? ["^ ","~:shelves",[["^ ","~:desc","","~:name","Science Fiction","~:books",[["^ ","~:id", ... edit: apparently this is "transit JSON" https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format
  - stopachka 6y ago
    It’s one of the clojure stack staples xD — would highly suggest checking out the language if you haven’t yet, it’s a lot of fun.
- stopachka 6y ago
  This is great feedback geoah, thank you! We’ll note and prioritize. Would love to learn more about tracking re-reads. Do you have an ideal ux in mind?
riezebos 6y ago
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)
- stopachka 6y ago
  Thanks for the kind words and feedback riezebos! re: improve speed -- great ideas. Will note and see what we can do! re: renaming shelf getting linked -- uhoh, sounds like a bug -- will look into this!.
GoshaLevin 6y ago
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?
- nezaj 6y ago
  Great suggestion! We’ve been hearing folks ask for this more and more. We’ll look into it!

70 points by stopachka 6y ago

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?

stopachka 6y ago

Hey HN, We're Joe & Stopa, from https://zeneca.io https://zeneca.io. We're building the successor to Goodreads. For now, you can create public bookshelves (i.e https://zeneca.io/stopa https://zeneca.io/stopa), discover like-minded readers, and share your favorite quotes and thoughts (i.e here's all I learned from PG: https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ) 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/joe + https://zeneca.io/stopa 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.

geraltofrivia 6y ago
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 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/ 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 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> 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.

ilolu 6y ago

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.

nezaj 6y ago
Thanks for the kind words ilolu! We used Google Books API

aninuth 6y ago

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).

nezaj 6y ago
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.
- aninuth 6y ago
  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!
- loosetypes 6y ago
  Interesting. How have you found the Google Books api so far?
  - stopachka 6y ago
    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.

baumandm 6y ago

This is great! I love the aesthetics and I've been waiting years for someone to provide a viable alternative to Goodreads.

stopachka 6y ago
Brought a smile to read, thank you baumandm!

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Great idea! But, <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.

vladsanchez 6y ago
I concur and support you! It will play out like that.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
Likewise, I don’t see this working for me in a few years time. Are there compelling reasons to use this today if I hope to use it in 5 years? This is why I generally only use things online that I can pay for, these days. It tends to ensure some degree of longer term service.
stopachka 6y ago
Fair concern Simone, 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.
- crossroadsguy 6y ago
  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..

vladsanchez 6y ago

Congrats on your launch! I once had a similar idea for which I registered but never actioned thereadinglog.com. Fear of Failure! :facepalm:

stopachka 6y ago
Cheers Vlad! And definitely empathize, re: fear of failure

throw0932439 6y ago

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.

stopachka 6y ago
Goodreads import is on the way! If you like, feel free to email us (stopa@js.ventures), and you'll be one of the first to try it!

pronoiac 6y ago

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.

stopachka 6y ago
We really like the name, so we are debating whether we should also make a COVID-19 vaccine, to have a fair shot with them xD (Jokes aside, indeed, something we'll have to figure out soon)
- fakedang 6y ago
  How about Cizero? /s

dstaley 6y ago

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.

stopachka 6y ago
Great points dstaley! 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! Here's to iterating : )

agustif 6y ago

I've had a similar idea like this but mainly for movies, anyone would dig it?

GoshaLevin 6y ago
It would be great! I would enjoy knowing what my friends watch and how they rank the movies.

gnicholas 6y ago

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.

nezaj 6y ago
Took another pass and made some fixes -- thanks for pointing this out!

lkbm 6y ago

Quick note, since I don't see a contact form: 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. "library edit page" is a link to https://www.zeneca.io/edit https://www.zeneca.io/edit -- which is a 404.

steve_adams_86 6y ago
I also had this experience - noting it in case the developers would like to know.
nezaj 6y ago
Fixed! Thanks for letting us know :) We'll add that contact form too!

perryizgr8 6y ago

Just thought I'd let you know that your sign in email is landing up in the junk folder in outlook.

nezaj 6y ago
Oof was not aware! Thanks for letting us know!

cluelessmaker 6y ago

Interesting name :)

geoah 6y ago

Congrats on the launch! 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.

geoah 6y ago
Also, was looking at the PUT /library request being made when you add a book. The body looks really weird, is that some weird framework? ["^ ","~:shelves",[["^ ","~:desc","","~:name","Science Fiction","~:books",[["^ ","~:id", ... edit: apparently this is "transit JSON" https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format
- stopachka 6y ago
  It’s one of the clojure stack staples xD — would highly suggest checking out the language if you haven’t yet, it’s a lot of fun.
stopachka 6y ago
This is great feedback geoah, thank you! We’ll note and prioritize. Would love to learn more about tracking re-reads. Do you have an ideal ux in mind?

riezebos 6y ago

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)

stopachka 6y ago
Thanks for the kind words and feedback riezebos! re: improve speed -- great ideas. Will note and see what we can do! re: renaming shelf getting linked -- uhoh, sounds like a bug -- will look into this!.

GoshaLevin 6y ago

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?

nezaj 6y ago
Great suggestion! We’ve been hearing folks ask for this more and more. We’ll look into it!