10 ms·

Show HN: Shepherd.com – Discover books in a new way, like wandering a bookstore

313 points by bwb 6y ago

bwb 6y ago
Hi all, the creator here :) I am trying to create an online experience that is like wandering through your local bookstore. Along with little notes pointing out great books by people who really know that topic. For the beta launch, I’ve got a little over 400 book recommendation lists by authors on specific subjects. These are all hand curated. Some of my favorites: The Best Books On The Power And Wonder of Mathematics https://shepherd.com/best-books/power-and-wonder-mathematics https://shepherd.com/best-books/power-and-wonder-mathematics The Best Books On The Meaning Of Life https://shepherd.com/best-books/meaning-of-life https://shepherd.com/best-books/meaning-of-life Tom is one of my favorite video essayists and worth a watch. The Best Books For Understanding Human Nature https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-human-nature https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-human-nature This is just the start and I have a lot of improvements coming. I will be adding related book lists so that you can keep following your curiosity from list to list. I know the homepage is a bit shitty. I will add actual topic support and topic pages this summer (and an improved card format coming soon for the listings on the bottom). I am hoping to get into NLP later this year to help me with topics around the books and book lists. Feel free to ask me anything! My email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to say hi or share some thoughts, Thanks, Ben
- james-bcn 6y ago
  How did you get all those authors to contribute?
  - bwb 6y ago
    Cold emails :) And, a great pitch about how this is a win/win, they get to feature their book alongside the list forever (plus switch it out when they have a new book coming out). And, they get to share their voice and expertise.
    - busymom0 6y ago
      Would you mind sharing examples of your cold email to them which got them to open and reply to your email?
      - bwb 6y ago
        Yep happy too, can you email me at ben@shepherd.com? I should note I personally customize them based on the author's book and genre, so that adds a lot of magic to this. Especially if I have read their book and can talk about it.
- afpx 6y ago
  I might have missed it, but it doesn’t seem to have any books about Christianity. Lots of other religions, though. How can that be? Was it a conscious decision?
  - bwb 6y ago
    It is just how topics timed out :), I did a big focus on Buddhism, meditation, and stoicism in the first couple of months. So they are over represented right now. I've redesigned how I do topics now so that they flow in more evenly, but there is a lag and that will take 3 to 4 months to start shaking out. There are these though if you are interested: https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-apologetics https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-apologetics https://shepherd.com/best-books/early-christianity https://shepherd.com/best-books/early-christianity https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-right https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-right https://shepherd.com/best-books/meeting-christianity-and-germanic-religions https://shepherd.com/best-books/meeting-christianity-and-ger... I am hoping authors notice me more now and that will help diversify what comes in without the cold outreach I do.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  I'm excited to see this. I've started to become really convinced lately that online shopping (for everything!) really needs a next leap forward. I'm sick of everything I can buy on the internet being presented as a grid of images with a title, description, and price, with a detail page if I click on it. The presentation of a physical stores is so varied! A small bookstore is so different from a large bookstore, which is so different from a toy-store, which is again so different from an auto-parts store. I think the online UX for shopping is in dire need of iteration at this point. There's a reason each of those physical stores are presented differently, and I feel like we've lost so much of that in online shopping. I'm really excited to see the ideas you come up with for ways to make buying books online different from buying shoes or auto-parts online. I hope you're able to find some of that magic that bookstores were able to create. Good luck!
- publicola1990 6y ago
  Fivebooks.com is similar in some aspects, their interviews with experts I find very enlightening. By now they do have lists on very wide variety of topics including eclectic ones. Eg: they have lists on books about Indonesia, about biographies of Charlemagne, about understanding Modern Greece, etc.
- celestialcheese 6y ago
  small bug or UX issue - most of the bookshop.org links on https://shepherd.com/best-books/scientists-who-write-science-fiction https://shepherd.com/best-books/scientists-who-write-science... lead to 404's.
  - bwb 6y ago
    Thanks, about 15% of the links to bookshop.org goes to a 404 page as they don't stock used books and don't have all the books Amazon does. We are working with them to find a way to make our system smarter, as right now they block our server from even checking their site for a 404.
bwb 6y ago
For any NLP experts out there, I'd really appreciate your thoughts on what I could do with NLP to help me tag book lists and possibly books with topics... I am super new to NLP, but I am looking at training a model to help me identify what the book-list is about such as specific person, place, specific event, group of people, medical condition, etc...
- grayne 6y ago
  Hi Ben, nice site. I'm no NLP expert but it might be worth taking a look at huggingface; they offer a simple API for all sorts of models. It looks like you'll be interested in their Zero-Shot Classification models in particular, e.g., https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-mnli https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-mnli. Try dropping some text in the box and see how it goes. Good luck!
  - bwb 6y ago
    Thank you, I will do that :)
croon 6y ago
This looks really great! The browsing part of book/record/media stores never translated online for me, even if finding something specific became instantaneous. Slight hijacking: Does anyone have any tips on how to find/browse books for children of varying ages? When I google I find mostly listicles with maybe a couple of takeaways, and amazon categories aren't very helpful to me. Commonsensemedia (a nonprofit) is good for evaluating some specific piece of media, and has some curated lists, but I'm hoping there's something better for discovery. My 3 year old loves books, but isn't reading a lot on her own just yet, but any recommendations in the ~5-6yo range welcome. She likes science, food, superheroes, inventions, fantasy probably works too.
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks! I have a 4-year-old so trying to figure out how to make this work for children's book is high on my list (I am hoping to ship a full Children's and YA section toward the Fall 2021). I did try a round of emailing teachers to see if they would be interested in recommending books but that didn't work. I am running tests now with children's authors to see how well that works. And, I am hoping toward the end of the year to use the Ingram API to show age recommendations on books and sort it so you can find books for specific ages (i want this too)... Personally, I spend a lot of time on Amazon reviews to try to sort through and find good kids books. I still get a fair number of duds there that we give away. My son is 4 and his favorites right now is the dory fantasmagory series. Some others he loves are big blue truck, snail and the whale (great book and all their books are amazing), gruffalo, mixed up chameleon, the tiger who came to tea, good day good night, Lion Inside (all their books are good), here we are (ditto for his books), the darkest dark (by astronaut), and Giraffes can't dance.
  - croon 6y ago
    Glad it's on the roadmap! > My son is 4 and his favorites right now is the dory fantasmagory series. Some others he loves are big blue truck, snail and the whale (great book and all their books are amazing), gruffalo, mixed up chameleon, the tiger who came to tea, good day good night, Lion Inside (all their books are good), here we are (ditto for his books), the darkest dark (by astronaut), and Giraffes can't dance. Perfect. We only have a few of those, and the Gruffalo is a real hit, so I'll definitely check out the others. Thanks a bunch!
varispeed 6y ago
I am increasingly finding it difficult to read books. It feels like it takes ages to read - like reading 20 pages feels like an hour gone by, but it was only 10 minutes. That adds anxiety, as if I am missing out on other things while I read. To keep up, I got the app Blinkist. I listened to dozens of excerpts from topics that interest me, but now I can't do that as I found that most books follow the same patterns and it is all the same. What to do?
- bwb 6y ago
  Ya, I've hit moments like that. For me, I look for a purely fun book that is just about escaping and enjoying a story. No pressure to learn or to think just escape. That is usually fantasy or a good space science fiction book.
  - haffi112 6y ago
    The name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss is a good start to get hooked on fantasy stories.
    - bwb 6y ago
      I love that one :), any other suggestions for me?
- coffeeri 6y ago
  I feel more or less the same way. But forcing myself to stick to one or two books at a time helped me. Eventually you will catch the fun in it. I also find audiobooks to be my favorite format for consuming books, as I can do it at any place and listen at my desired speed.
- senko 6y ago
  > That adds anxiety, as if I am missing out on other things while I read. I'd wager this right there is the problem. Sounds like you're reading through books like they are a chore. Instead, find one book with a subject/theme that interests you (so the subject itself is not boring) and then try to relax and read slowly. If it's fiction, savor every word and phrase, try to visualise the description/emotion/action. If it's non-fiction, think through what what you just read means, why is that's so (it's okay to not have answers, questions are important). I know "try to relax" is unhelpful. But one approach I'd try is to carve out a block of time (say, 1hr), put your phone/devices on Do Not Disturb, set an alarm for one hour (so you don't think too much time's slipping away) and just read. It's purely anecdotal, but both me and a couple of friends commented on how consuming short content (eg. youtube videos, short blog posts) led to "attention atrophy". If the content doesn't "get to the point" immediately, we get anxious and bored. If this describes you as well, try consuming less short-form and more long-form content (longer videos, longer in-depth articles, etc).
dt3ft 6y ago
I actually was hoping that this would be a 3D game-like environment, where you walk around a library and are able to click on a book and it appears in your hands and you can flip through a few pages, rotate it, examine the cover...
freddie_mercury 6y ago
This is a great idea! It is so great I'm already paying https://fivebooks.com/ https://fivebooks.com/ every month for it :-) Seriously, though, the more the merrier when it comes to reading and recommendations if you ask me!
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I've pretty much taken to automatically buying any book anyone recommends on HN[1]. So far it's lead me to a few interesting books I wouldn't have read, for example The Overstory is the most recent one. [1] Within reason.
  - bwb 6y ago
    You might like this site that I run too: https://hackernewsbooks.com/ https://hackernewsbooks.com/ We have a weekly newsletter for it that sends out the top 20 books discussed on HN that week. Be warned, it can hurt your book budget :)
    - genmon 6y ago
      This is amazing! Is the email newsletter critical to your model, or would you consider supporting RSS?
      - bwb 6y ago
        Thanks, I am not the orig creator but working with them on this as they are amazing (he even weighted it so it is based on HN Karma). I added RSS to my list of features, but not sure on ETA. Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com and I can update you once I get it added.
- bwb 6y ago
  I love Five Books (their long form format is fantastic)! Agreed, I am hoping the emergence of Bookshop.org helps a lot more book/reading related sites make enough money to flourish.
robbiejs 6y ago
I love the layout, the font combo and spacing really work for me. The website looks very "genuine" and "sincere". A lot of work must have gone into it! Have bookmarked it.
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks :), a lot of data entry over the last 6 weeks... I manually created 410 book lists, 2,311 books along with book cover images, and 2,453 author profiles. I've got a better backend system now so that I can get some help with the data entry to speed up that side of things.
- zackkatz 6y ago
  Seconded. Very easy to read! I’m also impressed by the speed of the site. Well done! One thing book stores have is gifts for people. “Someone who wants a book about dream interpretation may enjoy a rare minerals Rubin’s cube” may be a good way to increase your average referral fee. And don’t forget cards and stationary! You’ve got the layout down. Now I want to see more of the other items I see when browsing a bookstore!
  - bwb 6y ago
    Thanks, we are using CloudFlare and heavily cached. Plus I have an amazing developer who did an amazing job (and we use only Plausible.io for some basic stats). It is so nice to launch a site with no user component... :) Ah great idea, added to my list!
mindwok 6y ago
Wow, this is amazing. I have a really hard time finding books I'm interested in reading, but basically every list I clicked on on here got me excited about every book. Having someone well versed in such specific topics not only sorts the wheat from the chaff, but reading their passionate descriptions of each book they chose makes me excited to read them. Thank you this is fantastic!
- bwb 6y ago
  Sweet, that is so great to hear! If you have any ideas on how to improve it, help you sort, or anything shoot me an email (ben@shepherd.com).
jamiegreen 6y ago
Hi Ben, really nice site, bookmarked. I am curious, if you are open to sharing, what your business model is? I assume Amazon affiliates or similar, but do you have other plans for monetisation or is this more a side project for you? Either way, congrats!
- bwb 6y ago
  Yep I am very happy to share details. And, I will write more about this as I test monetization options here (http://build.shepherd.com/ http://build.shepherd.com/). This is a FT project for me (and a huge passion project as well). I am lucky in that I have had several business exits and I can afford to work on this without worrying about the money. That said, I need to eventually build a business around it because I do have costs for the amazing developer I work with, the amazing designer, and a few PT people that help with data entry. And, I'd like to accelerate development with the money the site generates. For the next 3 years my focus is on growing the content, features, and traffic. In the short term I have affiliate links to Amazon and Bookshop.org. I am not sure that will be enough to create a sustainable business but I should have more data within 3 to 6 months to know how that is going to play out. I have some crazier/wild ideas I want to try eventually, but those require a lot more traffic. For example, I'd like to try putting a book ad in between books 4 and 5 on every book recommendation page, and see if that is a good model (the idea being like Google PPC to do book ads on specific topics and thus a higher CTR / interest from readers). I'd like to find ways to help authors make more while I also am making more. Such as autographed book sales, selling posters/art related to books and trying to monetize some of their IP more, and so on. I am also playing with the idea of doing a Kick Starter or similar where I match what readers give to help get this going a little faster and giving a group VIP status within the site. Thoughts?
  - haffi112 6y ago
    That's a nice plan. I hope you succeed. I would love personalized recommendations as well (something that a person working at a book store could perform). That is, you've read and liked A, B and C, have you also read D? Or something like: "You've read many books by author X, he just released a new book". In that regard, I would also like to know the sequences of books that people read to get involved in a given topic. What are the books to enter a field? What books should you read after you've dipped your toes in? I'm developing algorithms for these kind of tasks. Get in touch if you want to discuss it.
hellbannedguy 6y ago
Here's an idea I have for an online bookstore. I like old books. Right now my interest is on Watchmaking, Electronics, and Machining. The books I like are are usually old, and only found while browsing used bookstores in person. Books with no isbn's. Books that are rare. Books I didn't knew existed. Manuals I didn't know about. My idea is having the owners of used book stores take pictures of the books they have on shelves(Just the spines. They would need to walk down the isles, and take clear pictures of each wall of books. They would send the pictures to me, and I would somehow stitch the pics into an app. I have taken pictures of my books on my shelfs, and even with an old iphone, I can zoom into read titles on books. The end result would be a website where the customer could digitally walk down book store isles (navigation like google maps?) , and order books they might fancy. Think of the way we look at digital paintings in museums? The owner would get 95% of each sale, or more? Or, all of the money, if the entity was set up as a 501c3 to benefit used book stores. Imagine all those old books out there, and walking down an isle on books in Ohio, or Ireland, and ordering a book you see on the shelf? On a certain level, I hope an app like this is never built by anyone. The internet has ruined so many things I liked. Finding an obscure book, at a reasonable price, in a musty book store is an experience I enjoy. (I'm suprised Google hasen't attempted it already. They could probally do it very well in a virtual reality setting? Oh yea, I like the app this guy did.)
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  That’s a great idea! My sister-in-law owns an independent bookstore. I suspect the idea could get some traction. However, you’d probably need more than spines. One of the things about being in a store, is the ability to pull the book out, and look into it; maybe even ask questions of the staff.
  - EveYoung 6y ago
    I guess you could use OCR and object detection to identify books from their spines and link to Google Books or Goodreads.
    - webmaven 6y ago
ryanar 6y ago
From the title, I was expecting some sort of google maps style walk through a library thing. But this is good! I found a category I was interested in and wanted to buy every book in it. Loved the personal notes.
misthop 6y ago
Really great site! I just found a handful of books to add to the pile. One piece of hopefully constructive criticism. In the topic list drop "The" from the leading word for alphabetizing, or at least disregard it. As someone who often looks for a topic/title in lists, I hate having to consider if I will find it where I expect, or if I need to dive into the great morass of "The..."
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks :), ya I don't actually have topic support yet, that is hacked together from a variable I use to construct the meta description. I am working to add true topic support along with topic pages and will ship that toward July/August to really improve it.
ayushchat 6y ago
This is awesome! Good stuff
alfonsodev 6y ago
Congrats! lovely idea! A humble suggestion would be to remove "The Best Books On .." prefix for every title, maybe just having it once at the top, as it creates a bit of friction while skimming trough the list, and I think is already implicit that it's a selection.
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion :). I am playing with some new card formats and I'll see how it looks if I remove that. No promises but I'll give it a try.
- jordanpg 6y ago
  I would also add that the "best" label is so overused by marketing best-of list sites on the internet these days that its very presence is a little suspicious. I would consider different wording. Perhaps "richest," "most worthwhile," "excellent," etc.
  - bwb 6y ago
    Ya the problem is that people use it to search for books 95% of the time, and they think that way :). It is this weird thing where I'd like to avoid it, but you can't if you want to connect with how people think and search for books.
wdb 6y ago
Great idea, and interesting website. But I will try steer away from it to protect my wallet (hopeless) :D
- bwb 6y ago
  You are telling me, as the creator it is crushing my wallet because I talk to these amazing authors and I am buying so many books :)
totetsu 6y ago
Does it do the thing where you can find a book that fell down from the shelf behind in another topic that might actually be more interesting than what you were looking for?
- bwb 6y ago
  Hah it will soon... kinda :). When I ship the related booklist feature in mid May it will suggest random best-book-lists to kinda achieve that... Preview of that feature here: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists
corobo 6y ago
I love the idea but could you put a link to fiction or Best Science Fiction or something somewhere on the page to jumpstart my browse? I have no interest in any of the homepage topics and have given up browsing. I probably just don't get it to be fair. In an actual book store though I'd beeline to the scifi section and then browse from there if I wasn't after anything in particular
- bwb 6y ago
  Yep, I am working on adding true topic support and search to get you to the right place toward July/August :). Right now the homepage is pretty basic as we are just getting started.
  - corobo 6y ago
    Awesome! Bookmarked + reminder set, I'll check back :D
ddoster 6y ago
Awesome site, Ben! Curation is really hard. I was with a company called Roadtrippers where we were curating road trip destinations and had the same passion about travel as you do about reading. There is a zen about browsing in a bookstore, and I see what you're going for here. The aisle experience, the recommendations from the wonderful book nerds who work there, author recommendations. Some of the best bookstores host live author readings and Q+A. Have you thought about doing these to promote your site? Platforms for that are taking off (CH and Spaces). Keep up the good work!
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks :), do you have any tips on curation? I could use them :) Great idea! I'd love to do author readings/events. I am hoping I can start peeking at what that would require later this summer. I felt like they would be ghost towns if I didn't have a way to get them in front of the right traffic/readers. I am aiming to ship true topic pages this summer and I felt like then I can show events to people who might be interested. For example, I recently attended a paid online talk by an author called Guy Walters on the real life Great Escape During WW2 (https://www.crowdcast.io/guywalters https://www.crowdcast.io/guywalters - he does these talks often and they are awesome). I felt like I couldn't effective promote it unless I have a topic page about World War 2 to gather signups. What do you think? How would you connect raw traffic to events they are interested in?
  - ddoster 6y ago
    How would you connect raw traffic to events they are interested in? Go where they hang with ads: ex. wwII podcasts, r/ww2 subreddit. Where did you see the Guy Walters talk? Advertise there! Start with your most trafficked topics. Analytics are your friend. Same goes for curated content.
    - bwb 6y ago
      Thanks :). When they are on Shepherd I am thinking about how to divide them out into interest beyond topics. i.e. I wouldn't want to pitch a WW2 book reading to people not interested in WW2.
jordanpg 6y ago
So, curated lists? I like the idea, and the execution, but not sure what it has to do with my local bookstores. Perhaps the next evolution of bookstores (particularly since this is linking to Amazon)? One suggestion: for topics that have one or more "sides" to them or that are controversial, considering cross-linking to a list that captures the other side, or skepticism, or critique, or more reading. For example, "Snipers In The Vietnam War" might link to "The Vietnam War Era." Emphatically not talking about politics here.
- bwb 6y ago
  Yep, this is a starting point and I am working toward the goal of building an experience that is like wandering through a bookstore :). I will never replace local bookstores and my hope is to help them get more business. I've been talking with authors about ideas there too and as this project gets further along I am hoping to extend the recommendations I am collecting for them to use in their stores along with the materials. Plus I am hoping to figure out ways to get them foot traffic. Great idea! How would you identify the other side / challenges to that book list? This is something I am thinking about a lot as I want to combat social media who serves up the same worldview to people without challenging it. Here is a preview screenshot of the related book list feature I plan to add to every list next month too: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists Please let me know what you think and if you want to take this to email I am at ben@shepherd.com.
- NickNaraghi 6y ago
  I'm reminded of Benedict Evan's quote from "Lists are the new Search"[0]: "All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation." [0]: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/1/31/lists-are-the-new-search https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/1/31/lists-are-...
cik 6y ago
Well that's not what I was hoping for. I want to see bookshelves - like in the physical store. I want to go to a section (sci-fi, fantasy, cooking, whatever) and browse the bookshelf, with a rendered cover. Then, I want to click on that cover and read the back of the book, on the book jacket. A sample of a page or two would be nice, but for me it's unnecessary. Finally, buttons to purchase the treepub, epub, audiobook, etc. are all fine - keep that experience digital. I keep visiting physical bookstores for this reason. Book discovery online is nowhere near as fun, as it was in a physical store.
- bwb 6y ago
  Yep I hear you :) I am working to add Topics which I am calling Shelves toward July/August to expand the experience and get closer to what I hope to achieve. Here is a really rough preview of part of that: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages Please keep in mind that is a very early mockup and I am currently redoing it heavily. But the idea is to recommend books one by one to start, as well as better ways to view them (ignore the bottom of the mockup as that is all being redone). The back of the book jacket costs about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to license, so I can't do that yet. But down the road I might look at that. For now people can click through to the store to see that too.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    $1k-2k per month for the back cover of a single book makes me think that the publishing industry should be explosively disrupted. Not sure how exactly, but that is ridiculous. Here is an idea: a movement towards exclusively epub with open source DRM and cryptocurrency. And local physical stores can just start printing jackets.
    - bwb 6y ago
      Well that includes all the books metadata like cover image, author etc, but ya I agree :). I think part of the problem is that fee to Ingram is for flat files or their API, and you are basically paying them to centralize what they collect from authors.
mhb 6y ago
Minor suggestion: Don't include leading The when alphabetizing titles.
- bwb 6y ago
  Yep, that is due to some of the mess with the fake topic setup we have now. It is due to be cleaned up as we build out real topic support long term, and short term I am looking to improve that card format.
marton_s 6y ago
I am the engineer who built the software behind Shepherd.com and published my "backstage" perspective of the project here: https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html Ask me anything! tl;dr It's built using Django + PostgreSQL + Heroku + Cloudflare + Cloudinary + GitHub Actions.
- bwb 6y ago
  Bump, Márton has done an awesome job and found him via HN luckily :)
kingsuper20 6y ago
I'm sick and tired of curated lists of books, whether it's by Amazon or anyone else. Does Amazon present enough of an API that a person could write a user interface that allowed browsing of books by Dewey Decimal (or LOC)? Searching by name or some internal search engine's idea of how to maximize profits is crazy-making. As a side note, I didn't like the bookstore model when it was applied to some libraries, much less a website. It's not appropriate for large collections and God knows there's plenty of top ten lists on the web. note to self: Could libgen be presented in Dewey Decimal form? I realize that Dewey doesn't apply to fiction.
publicola1990 6y ago
Fivebooks.com is very similar, and their interviews/articles are usually high quality content, not just publishing industry fluff that just want to push recently released books of questionable quality, in your face.
valvar 6y ago
For surprisingly excellent curated lists by anonymous 4chan users, I can recommend https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Charts https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Charts
knight17 6y ago
In a similar vein: Five books. It recommends books by experts on a particular topic. - https://fivebooks.com/ https://fivebooks.com/ "In case you’re new to Five Books, the format is: an expert, a topic and the five best books on that topic, explained in an interview. Tip: you’ll normally learn quite a lot about the topic from our interviews, even if you don’t get around to reading all the books." Some random lists: Best books on Sin: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/paula-fredriksen-on-sin/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/paula-fredriksen-on-sin/ Scientific differences between Women and Men: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/scientific-differences-between-women-and-men-angela-saini/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/scientific-differences-betw... Favourite Science books for kids: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/science-books-for-kids-alice-bell/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/science-books-for-kids-alic...
- 07121941 6y ago
  I love this site, use it all the time. Also I know it goes without saying but goodreads lists are great for this sort of thing too.
yosito 6y ago
Is there more to this than just "curated book lists"? I found that the only option was to scroll through the list and see if there was a topic that caught my attention, and once I found an interesting one, it was just a list of books. Plenty of platforms have this feature. For me, having someone else pick my reading list doesn't have much appeal to me either, especially if that "someone else" is a startup that has an agenda of their own.
- bwb 6y ago
  Yep, good question, this is just the start, and next we will relate those book lists to each other to help you follow topics you might be interested in. As well as eventually pages around topics like WW2, Grief, The Cold War, etc. These book recommendations are all recommended by experts in those fields and they they pick those with no input from us. And, just me on the project.
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brudgers 6y ago
The thing about a physical bookstore is that everything is not smushed down into beige metadata. The neon green cover says something. The 6" x 6" x 2" book stands out from its tradebound neighbors. Some books are spine out. Some books are front cover spaced. Some wrapped in plastic. Some beaten to soft corners by years of thumb throughs. The smell of paper and ink. Other people around who love books. Holding and turning to see the price and opening to a random page to see how it reads. And used bookstores stocked full with pieces of other people's life.
kokanator 6y ago
Escaping the suggestion algorithm is what the physical bookstore does for me. Yes suggestions can be helpful to a point but limit the ability for discovery. Books in general are about discovery whether that is discovering knowledge or discovering new worlds. A bookstore is an extension of this. Lists do this to some degree but someone has done the discovery for you. ( and I don't have the answer here ) But we need to find a way to allow the discovery to occur.
chaostheory 6y ago
I dig your Netflix style categorizations, but it would be nice to have a Netflix like UI to go along with it. Still nice though
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks, so you want to browse purely on book cover? Or some format with book cover + breakdown?
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    Something like that. Something that's closer to going to local bookstore. The cover catches your eye first, then you go to to the summary. If you really want a revolution, a VR centric UI would be the real game changer.
randallsquared 6y ago
Suggestion: remove leading article words before alphabetical sorting. "A Gardening Guide" and "Gardening Guide" are better sorted together.
- bwb 6y ago
  Yep, topics is really a hacked together concept right now and we are adding a full implementation over the coming months. That will be shipped toward July and fix all that :)
sndean 6y ago
The fact that there's a list for a topic so narrow ("The Best Books On The Parthian Empire" [0]) on the front page makes me like this a lot. Definitely bookmarked. Not that I've looked elsewhere for a list of books on the Parthians, but that does certainly fulfill the "discover" part in the title. [0] https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-parthian-empire https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-parthian-empire
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks :), we have another two you might like: The Best Books On Parthia And The War with Rome In The 1st Century BCE https://shepherd.com/best-books/parthia-and-war-rome-1st-century-bce https://shepherd.com/best-books/parthia-and-war-rome-1st-cen...
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grawprog 6y ago
This isn't like 'wandering through a book store' at all. This is a bunch of best of lists written by authors. It's not even close to being comparable to wandering through a book store...this isn't even a new way to discover books. It's just a bunch of recommendations on books on various topics by authors. Why would you make the description so disingenuous? Just call it what it is, a curated collection of best of lists... Then again, I guess that's not really something you can make a Show: HN about.
- libraryatnight 6y ago
  Agreed. There's no organic exploration, no sense of discovery. Given the description I feel incredibly let down.
ospohngellert 6y ago
Figure this is as good a place as any to ask this: I have been looking for good books to read for learning about foreign policy. Didn't see any foreign policy lists on the linked cite, wanted to see if any users had recommendations :)
- bwb 6y ago
  Sorry I haven't gotten to that topic yet, and no recommendations. I did add it to my list to work on :)
DarrenDev 6y ago
Fantastic domain. Did you own it beforehand or acquire it special?

313 points by bwb 6y ago

bwb 6y ago

Hi all, the creator here :) I am trying to create an online experience that is like wandering through your local bookstore. Along with little notes pointing out great books by people who really know that topic. For the beta launch, I’ve got a little over 400 book recommendation lists by authors on specific subjects. These are all hand curated. Some of my favorites: The Best Books On The Power And Wonder of Mathematics https://shepherd.com/best-books/power-and-wonder-mathematics https://shepherd.com/best-books/power-and-wonder-mathematics The Best Books On The Meaning Of Life https://shepherd.com/best-books/meaning-of-life https://shepherd.com/best-books/meaning-of-life Tom is one of my favorite video essayists and worth a watch. The Best Books For Understanding Human Nature https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-human-nature https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-human-nature This is just the start and I have a lot of improvements coming. I will be adding related book lists so that you can keep following your curiosity from list to list. I know the homepage is a bit shitty. I will add actual topic support and topic pages this summer (and an improved card format coming soon for the listings on the bottom). I am hoping to get into NLP later this year to help me with topics around the books and book lists. Feel free to ask me anything! My email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to say hi or share some thoughts, Thanks, Ben

james-bcn 6y ago
How did you get all those authors to contribute?
- bwb 6y ago
  Cold emails :) And, a great pitch about how this is a win/win, they get to feature their book alongside the list forever (plus switch it out when they have a new book coming out). And, they get to share their voice and expertise.
  - busymom0 6y ago
    Would you mind sharing examples of your cold email to them which got them to open and reply to your email?
    - bwb 6y ago
      Yep happy too, can you email me at ben@shepherd.com? I should note I personally customize them based on the author's book and genre, so that adds a lot of magic to this. Especially if I have read their book and can talk about it.
afpx 6y ago
I might have missed it, but it doesn’t seem to have any books about Christianity. Lots of other religions, though. How can that be? Was it a conscious decision?
- bwb 6y ago
  It is just how topics timed out :), I did a big focus on Buddhism, meditation, and stoicism in the first couple of months. So they are over represented right now. I've redesigned how I do topics now so that they flow in more evenly, but there is a lag and that will take 3 to 4 months to start shaking out. There are these though if you are interested: https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-apologetics https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-apologetics https://shepherd.com/best-books/early-christianity https://shepherd.com/best-books/early-christianity https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-right https://shepherd.com/best-books/christian-right https://shepherd.com/best-books/meeting-christianity-and-germanic-religions https://shepherd.com/best-books/meeting-christianity-and-ger... I am hoping authors notice me more now and that will help diversify what comes in without the cold outreach I do.
ncallaway 6y ago
I'm excited to see this. I've started to become really convinced lately that online shopping (for everything!) really needs a next leap forward. I'm sick of everything I can buy on the internet being presented as a grid of images with a title, description, and price, with a detail page if I click on it. The presentation of a physical stores is so varied! A small bookstore is so different from a large bookstore, which is so different from a toy-store, which is again so different from an auto-parts store. I think the online UX for shopping is in dire need of iteration at this point. There's a reason each of those physical stores are presented differently, and I feel like we've lost so much of that in online shopping. I'm really excited to see the ideas you come up with for ways to make buying books online different from buying shoes or auto-parts online. I hope you're able to find some of that magic that bookstores were able to create. Good luck!
publicola1990 6y ago
Fivebooks.com is similar in some aspects, their interviews with experts I find very enlightening. By now they do have lists on very wide variety of topics including eclectic ones. Eg: they have lists on books about Indonesia, about biographies of Charlemagne, about understanding Modern Greece, etc.
celestialcheese 6y ago
small bug or UX issue - most of the bookshop.org links on https://shepherd.com/best-books/scientists-who-write-science-fiction https://shepherd.com/best-books/scientists-who-write-science... lead to 404's.
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks, about 15% of the links to bookshop.org goes to a 404 page as they don't stock used books and don't have all the books Amazon does. We are working with them to find a way to make our system smarter, as right now they block our server from even checking their site for a 404.

bwb 6y ago

For any NLP experts out there, I'd really appreciate your thoughts on what I could do with NLP to help me tag book lists and possibly books with topics... I am super new to NLP, but I am looking at training a model to help me identify what the book-list is about such as specific person, place, specific event, group of people, medical condition, etc...

grayne 6y ago
Hi Ben, nice site. I'm no NLP expert but it might be worth taking a look at huggingface; they offer a simple API for all sorts of models. It looks like you'll be interested in their Zero-Shot Classification models in particular, e.g., https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-mnli https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-mnli. Try dropping some text in the box and see how it goes. Good luck!
- bwb 6y ago
  Thank you, I will do that :)

croon 6y ago

This looks really great! The browsing part of book/record/media stores never translated online for me, even if finding something specific became instantaneous. Slight hijacking: Does anyone have any tips on how to find/browse books for children of varying ages? When I google I find mostly listicles with maybe a couple of takeaways, and amazon categories aren't very helpful to me. Commonsensemedia (a nonprofit) is good for evaluating some specific piece of media, and has some curated lists, but I'm hoping there's something better for discovery. My 3 year old loves books, but isn't reading a lot on her own just yet, but any recommendations in the ~5-6yo range welcome. She likes science, food, superheroes, inventions, fantasy probably works too.

bwb 6y ago
Thanks! I have a 4-year-old so trying to figure out how to make this work for children's book is high on my list (I am hoping to ship a full Children's and YA section toward the Fall 2021). I did try a round of emailing teachers to see if they would be interested in recommending books but that didn't work. I am running tests now with children's authors to see how well that works. And, I am hoping toward the end of the year to use the Ingram API to show age recommendations on books and sort it so you can find books for specific ages (i want this too)... Personally, I spend a lot of time on Amazon reviews to try to sort through and find good kids books. I still get a fair number of duds there that we give away. My son is 4 and his favorites right now is the dory fantasmagory series. Some others he loves are big blue truck, snail and the whale (great book and all their books are amazing), gruffalo, mixed up chameleon, the tiger who came to tea, good day good night, Lion Inside (all their books are good), here we are (ditto for his books), the darkest dark (by astronaut), and Giraffes can't dance.
- croon 6y ago
  Glad it's on the roadmap! > My son is 4 and his favorites right now is the dory fantasmagory series. Some others he loves are big blue truck, snail and the whale (great book and all their books are amazing), gruffalo, mixed up chameleon, the tiger who came to tea, good day good night, Lion Inside (all their books are good), here we are (ditto for his books), the darkest dark (by astronaut), and Giraffes can't dance. Perfect. We only have a few of those, and the Gruffalo is a real hit, so I'll definitely check out the others. Thanks a bunch!

varispeed 6y ago

I am increasingly finding it difficult to read books. It feels like it takes ages to read - like reading 20 pages feels like an hour gone by, but it was only 10 minutes. That adds anxiety, as if I am missing out on other things while I read. To keep up, I got the app Blinkist. I listened to dozens of excerpts from topics that interest me, but now I can't do that as I found that most books follow the same patterns and it is all the same. What to do?

bwb 6y ago
Ya, I've hit moments like that. For me, I look for a purely fun book that is just about escaping and enjoying a story. No pressure to learn or to think just escape. That is usually fantasy or a good space science fiction book.
- haffi112 6y ago
  The name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss is a good start to get hooked on fantasy stories.
  - bwb 6y ago
    I love that one :), any other suggestions for me?
coffeeri 6y ago
I feel more or less the same way. But forcing myself to stick to one or two books at a time helped me. Eventually you will catch the fun in it. I also find audiobooks to be my favorite format for consuming books, as I can do it at any place and listen at my desired speed.
senko 6y ago
> That adds anxiety, as if I am missing out on other things while I read. I'd wager this right there is the problem. Sounds like you're reading through books like they are a chore. Instead, find one book with a subject/theme that interests you (so the subject itself is not boring) and then try to relax and read slowly. If it's fiction, savor every word and phrase, try to visualise the description/emotion/action. If it's non-fiction, think through what what you just read means, why is that's so (it's okay to not have answers, questions are important). I know "try to relax" is unhelpful. But one approach I'd try is to carve out a block of time (say, 1hr), put your phone/devices on Do Not Disturb, set an alarm for one hour (so you don't think too much time's slipping away) and just read. It's purely anecdotal, but both me and a couple of friends commented on how consuming short content (eg. youtube videos, short blog posts) led to "attention atrophy". If the content doesn't "get to the point" immediately, we get anxious and bored. If this describes you as well, try consuming less short-form and more long-form content (longer videos, longer in-depth articles, etc).

dt3ft 6y ago

I actually was hoping that this would be a 3D game-like environment, where you walk around a library and are able to click on a book and it appears in your hands and you can flip through a few pages, rotate it, examine the cover...

freddie_mercury 6y ago

This is a great idea! It is so great I'm already paying https://fivebooks.com/ https://fivebooks.com/ every month for it :-) Seriously, though, the more the merrier when it comes to reading and recommendations if you ask me!

VBprogrammer 6y ago
I've pretty much taken to automatically buying any book anyone recommends on HN[1]. So far it's lead me to a few interesting books I wouldn't have read, for example The Overstory is the most recent one. [1] Within reason.
- bwb 6y ago
  You might like this site that I run too: https://hackernewsbooks.com/ https://hackernewsbooks.com/ We have a weekly newsletter for it that sends out the top 20 books discussed on HN that week. Be warned, it can hurt your book budget :)
  - genmon 6y ago
    This is amazing! Is the email newsletter critical to your model, or would you consider supporting RSS?
    - bwb 6y ago
      Thanks, I am not the orig creator but working with them on this as they are amazing (he even weighted it so it is based on HN Karma). I added RSS to my list of features, but not sure on ETA. Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com and I can update you once I get it added.
bwb 6y ago
I love Five Books (their long form format is fantastic)! Agreed, I am hoping the emergence of Bookshop.org helps a lot more book/reading related sites make enough money to flourish.

robbiejs 6y ago

I love the layout, the font combo and spacing really work for me. The website looks very "genuine" and "sincere". A lot of work must have gone into it! Have bookmarked it.

bwb 6y ago
Thanks :), a lot of data entry over the last 6 weeks... I manually created 410 book lists, 2,311 books along with book cover images, and 2,453 author profiles. I've got a better backend system now so that I can get some help with the data entry to speed up that side of things.
zackkatz 6y ago
Seconded. Very easy to read! I’m also impressed by the speed of the site. Well done! One thing book stores have is gifts for people. “Someone who wants a book about dream interpretation may enjoy a rare minerals Rubin’s cube” may be a good way to increase your average referral fee. And don’t forget cards and stationary! You’ve got the layout down. Now I want to see more of the other items I see when browsing a bookstore!
- bwb 6y ago
  Thanks, we are using CloudFlare and heavily cached. Plus I have an amazing developer who did an amazing job (and we use only Plausible.io for some basic stats). It is so nice to launch a site with no user component... :) Ah great idea, added to my list!

mindwok 6y ago

Wow, this is amazing. I have a really hard time finding books I'm interested in reading, but basically every list I clicked on on here got me excited about every book. Having someone well versed in such specific topics not only sorts the wheat from the chaff, but reading their passionate descriptions of each book they chose makes me excited to read them. Thank you this is fantastic!

bwb 6y ago
Sweet, that is so great to hear! If you have any ideas on how to improve it, help you sort, or anything shoot me an email (ben@shepherd.com).

jamiegreen 6y ago

Hi Ben, really nice site, bookmarked. I am curious, if you are open to sharing, what your business model is? I assume Amazon affiliates or similar, but do you have other plans for monetisation or is this more a side project for you? Either way, congrats!

bwb 6y ago
Yep I am very happy to share details. And, I will write more about this as I test monetization options here (http://build.shepherd.com/ http://build.shepherd.com/). This is a FT project for me (and a huge passion project as well). I am lucky in that I have had several business exits and I can afford to work on this without worrying about the money. That said, I need to eventually build a business around it because I do have costs for the amazing developer I work with, the amazing designer, and a few PT people that help with data entry. And, I'd like to accelerate development with the money the site generates. For the next 3 years my focus is on growing the content, features, and traffic. In the short term I have affiliate links to Amazon and Bookshop.org. I am not sure that will be enough to create a sustainable business but I should have more data within 3 to 6 months to know how that is going to play out. I have some crazier/wild ideas I want to try eventually, but those require a lot more traffic. For example, I'd like to try putting a book ad in between books 4 and 5 on every book recommendation page, and see if that is a good model (the idea being like Google PPC to do book ads on specific topics and thus a higher CTR / interest from readers). I'd like to find ways to help authors make more while I also am making more. Such as autographed book sales, selling posters/art related to books and trying to monetize some of their IP more, and so on. I am also playing with the idea of doing a Kick Starter or similar where I match what readers give to help get this going a little faster and giving a group VIP status within the site. Thoughts?
- haffi112 6y ago
  That's a nice plan. I hope you succeed. I would love personalized recommendations as well (something that a person working at a book store could perform). That is, you've read and liked A, B and C, have you also read D? Or something like: "You've read many books by author X, he just released a new book". In that regard, I would also like to know the sequences of books that people read to get involved in a given topic. What are the books to enter a field? What books should you read after you've dipped your toes in? I'm developing algorithms for these kind of tasks. Get in touch if you want to discuss it.

hellbannedguy 6y ago

Here's an idea I have for an online bookstore. I like old books. Right now my interest is on Watchmaking, Electronics, and Machining. The books I like are are usually old, and only found while browsing used bookstores in person. Books with no isbn's. Books that are rare. Books I didn't knew existed. Manuals I didn't know about. My idea is having the owners of used book stores take pictures of the books they have on shelves(Just the spines. They would need to walk down the isles, and take clear pictures of each wall of books. They would send the pictures to me, and I would somehow stitch the pics into an app. I have taken pictures of my books on my shelfs, and even with an old iphone, I can zoom into read titles on books. The end result would be a website where the customer could digitally walk down book store isles (navigation like google maps?) , and order books they might fancy. Think of the way we look at digital paintings in museums? The owner would get 95% of each sale, or more? Or, all of the money, if the entity was set up as a 501c3 to benefit used book stores. Imagine all those old books out there, and walking down an isle on books in Ohio, or Ireland, and ordering a book you see on the shelf? On a certain level, I hope an app like this is never built by anyone. The internet has ruined so many things I liked. Finding an obscure book, at a reasonable price, in a musty book store is an experience I enjoy. (I'm suprised Google hasen't attempted it already. They could probally do it very well in a virtual reality setting? Oh yea, I like the app this guy did.)

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
That’s a great idea! My sister-in-law owns an independent bookstore. I suspect the idea could get some traction. However, you’d probably need more than spines. One of the things about being in a store, is the ability to pull the book out, and look into it; maybe even ask questions of the staff.
- EveYoung 6y ago
  I guess you could use OCR and object detection to identify books from their spines and link to Google Books or Goodreads.
  - webmaven 6y ago

ryanar 6y ago

From the title, I was expecting some sort of google maps style walk through a library thing. But this is good! I found a category I was interested in and wanted to buy every book in it. Loved the personal notes.

misthop 6y ago

Really great site! I just found a handful of books to add to the pile. One piece of hopefully constructive criticism. In the topic list drop "The" from the leading word for alphabetizing, or at least disregard it. As someone who often looks for a topic/title in lists, I hate having to consider if I will find it where I expect, or if I need to dive into the great morass of "The..."

bwb 6y ago
Thanks :), ya I don't actually have topic support yet, that is hacked together from a variable I use to construct the meta description. I am working to add true topic support along with topic pages and will ship that toward July/August to really improve it.

ayushchat 6y ago

This is awesome! Good stuff

alfonsodev 6y ago

Congrats! lovely idea! A humble suggestion would be to remove "The Best Books On .." prefix for every title, maybe just having it once at the top, as it creates a bit of friction while skimming trough the list, and I think is already implicit that it's a selection.

bwb 6y ago
Thanks for the suggestion :). I am playing with some new card formats and I'll see how it looks if I remove that. No promises but I'll give it a try.
jordanpg 6y ago
I would also add that the "best" label is so overused by marketing best-of list sites on the internet these days that its very presence is a little suspicious. I would consider different wording. Perhaps "richest," "most worthwhile," "excellent," etc.
- bwb 6y ago
  Ya the problem is that people use it to search for books 95% of the time, and they think that way :). It is this weird thing where I'd like to avoid it, but you can't if you want to connect with how people think and search for books.

wdb 6y ago

Great idea, and interesting website. But I will try steer away from it to protect my wallet (hopeless) :D

bwb 6y ago
You are telling me, as the creator it is crushing my wallet because I talk to these amazing authors and I am buying so many books :)

totetsu 6y ago

Does it do the thing where you can find a book that fell down from the shelf behind in another topic that might actually be more interesting than what you were looking for?

bwb 6y ago
Hah it will soon... kinda :). When I ship the related booklist feature in mid May it will suggest random best-book-lists to kinda achieve that... Preview of that feature here: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists

corobo 6y ago

I love the idea but could you put a link to fiction or Best Science Fiction or something somewhere on the page to jumpstart my browse? I have no interest in any of the homepage topics and have given up browsing. I probably just don't get it to be fair. In an actual book store though I'd beeline to the scifi section and then browse from there if I wasn't after anything in particular

bwb 6y ago
Yep, I am working on adding true topic support and search to get you to the right place toward July/August :). Right now the homepage is pretty basic as we are just getting started.
- corobo 6y ago
  Awesome! Bookmarked + reminder set, I'll check back :D

ddoster 6y ago

Awesome site, Ben! Curation is really hard. I was with a company called Roadtrippers where we were curating road trip destinations and had the same passion about travel as you do about reading. There is a zen about browsing in a bookstore, and I see what you're going for here. The aisle experience, the recommendations from the wonderful book nerds who work there, author recommendations. Some of the best bookstores host live author readings and Q+A. Have you thought about doing these to promote your site? Platforms for that are taking off (CH and Spaces). Keep up the good work!

bwb 6y ago
Thanks :), do you have any tips on curation? I could use them :) Great idea! I'd love to do author readings/events. I am hoping I can start peeking at what that would require later this summer. I felt like they would be ghost towns if I didn't have a way to get them in front of the right traffic/readers. I am aiming to ship true topic pages this summer and I felt like then I can show events to people who might be interested. For example, I recently attended a paid online talk by an author called Guy Walters on the real life Great Escape During WW2 (https://www.crowdcast.io/guywalters https://www.crowdcast.io/guywalters - he does these talks often and they are awesome). I felt like I couldn't effective promote it unless I have a topic page about World War 2 to gather signups. What do you think? How would you connect raw traffic to events they are interested in?
- ddoster 6y ago
  How would you connect raw traffic to events they are interested in? Go where they hang with ads: ex. wwII podcasts, r/ww2 subreddit. Where did you see the Guy Walters talk? Advertise there! Start with your most trafficked topics. Analytics are your friend. Same goes for curated content.
  - bwb 6y ago
    Thanks :). When they are on Shepherd I am thinking about how to divide them out into interest beyond topics. i.e. I wouldn't want to pitch a WW2 book reading to people not interested in WW2.

jordanpg 6y ago

So, curated lists? I like the idea, and the execution, but not sure what it has to do with my local bookstores. Perhaps the next evolution of bookstores (particularly since this is linking to Amazon)? One suggestion: for topics that have one or more "sides" to them or that are controversial, considering cross-linking to a list that captures the other side, or skepticism, or critique, or more reading. For example, "Snipers In The Vietnam War" might link to "The Vietnam War Era." Emphatically not talking about politics here.

bwb 6y ago
Yep, this is a starting point and I am working toward the goal of building an experience that is like wandering through a bookstore :). I will never replace local bookstores and my hope is to help them get more business. I've been talking with authors about ideas there too and as this project gets further along I am hoping to extend the recommendations I am collecting for them to use in their stores along with the materials. Plus I am hoping to figure out ways to get them foot traffic. Great idea! How would you identify the other side / challenges to that book list? This is something I am thinking about a lot as I want to combat social media who serves up the same worldview to people without challenging it. Here is a preview screenshot of the related book list feature I plan to add to every list next month too: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists Please let me know what you think and if you want to take this to email I am at ben@shepherd.com.
NickNaraghi 6y ago
I'm reminded of Benedict Evan's quote from "Lists are the new Search"[0]: "All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation." [0]: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/1/31/lists-are-the-new-search https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/1/31/lists-are-...

cik 6y ago

Well that's not what I was hoping for. I want to see bookshelves - like in the physical store. I want to go to a section (sci-fi, fantasy, cooking, whatever) and browse the bookshelf, with a rendered cover. Then, I want to click on that cover and read the back of the book, on the book jacket. A sample of a page or two would be nice, but for me it's unnecessary. Finally, buttons to purchase the treepub, epub, audiobook, etc. are all fine - keep that experience digital. I keep visiting physical bookstores for this reason. Book discovery online is nowhere near as fun, as it was in a physical store.

bwb 6y ago
Yep I hear you :) I am working to add Topics which I am calling Shelves toward July/August to expand the experience and get closer to what I hope to achieve. Here is a really rough preview of part of that: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages Please keep in mind that is a very early mockup and I am currently redoing it heavily. But the idea is to recommend books one by one to start, as well as better ways to view them (ignore the bottom of the mockup as that is all being redone). The back of the book jacket costs about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to license, so I can't do that yet. But down the road I might look at that. For now people can click through to the store to see that too.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  $1k-2k per month for the back cover of a single book makes me think that the publishing industry should be explosively disrupted. Not sure how exactly, but that is ridiculous. Here is an idea: a movement towards exclusively epub with open source DRM and cryptocurrency. And local physical stores can just start printing jackets.
  - bwb 6y ago
    Well that includes all the books metadata like cover image, author etc, but ya I agree :). I think part of the problem is that fee to Ingram is for flat files or their API, and you are basically paying them to centralize what they collect from authors.

mhb 6y ago

Minor suggestion: Don't include leading The when alphabetizing titles.

bwb 6y ago
Yep, that is due to some of the mess with the fake topic setup we have now. It is due to be cleaned up as we build out real topic support long term, and short term I am looking to improve that card format.

marton_s 6y ago

I am the engineer who built the software behind Shepherd.com and published my "backstage" perspective of the project here: https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html Ask me anything! tl;dr It's built using Django + PostgreSQL + Heroku + Cloudflare + Cloudinary + GitHub Actions.

bwb 6y ago
Bump, Márton has done an awesome job and found him via HN luckily :)

kingsuper20 6y ago

I'm sick and tired of curated lists of books, whether it's by Amazon or anyone else. Does Amazon present enough of an API that a person could write a user interface that allowed browsing of books by Dewey Decimal (or LOC)? Searching by name or some internal search engine's idea of how to maximize profits is crazy-making. As a side note, I didn't like the bookstore model when it was applied to some libraries, much less a website. It's not appropriate for large collections and God knows there's plenty of top ten lists on the web. note to self: Could libgen be presented in Dewey Decimal form? I realize that Dewey doesn't apply to fiction.

publicola1990 6y ago

Fivebooks.com is very similar, and their interviews/articles are usually high quality content, not just publishing industry fluff that just want to push recently released books of questionable quality, in your face.

valvar 6y ago

For surprisingly excellent curated lists by anonymous 4chan users, I can recommend https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Charts https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Charts

knight17 6y ago

In a similar vein: Five books. It recommends books by experts on a particular topic. - https://fivebooks.com/ https://fivebooks.com/ "In case you’re new to Five Books, the format is: an expert, a topic and the five best books on that topic, explained in an interview. Tip: you’ll normally learn quite a lot about the topic from our interviews, even if you don’t get around to reading all the books." Some random lists: Best books on Sin: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/paula-fredriksen-on-sin/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/paula-fredriksen-on-sin/ Scientific differences between Women and Men: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/scientific-differences-between-women-and-men-angela-saini/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/scientific-differences-betw... Favourite Science books for kids: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/science-books-for-kids-alice-bell/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/science-books-for-kids-alic...

07121941 6y ago
I love this site, use it all the time. Also I know it goes without saying but goodreads lists are great for this sort of thing too.

yosito 6y ago

Is there more to this than just "curated book lists"? I found that the only option was to scroll through the list and see if there was a topic that caught my attention, and once I found an interesting one, it was just a list of books. Plenty of platforms have this feature. For me, having someone else pick my reading list doesn't have much appeal to me either, especially if that "someone else" is a startup that has an agenda of their own.

bwb 6y ago
Yep, good question, this is just the start, and next we will relate those book lists to each other to help you follow topics you might be interested in. As well as eventually pages around topics like WW2, Grief, The Cold War, etc. These book recommendations are all recommended by experts in those fields and they they pick those with no input from us. And, just me on the project.

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brudgers 6y ago

The thing about a physical bookstore is that everything is not smushed down into beige metadata. The neon green cover says something. The 6" x 6" x 2" book stands out from its tradebound neighbors. Some books are spine out. Some books are front cover spaced. Some wrapped in plastic. Some beaten to soft corners by years of thumb throughs. The smell of paper and ink. Other people around who love books. Holding and turning to see the price and opening to a random page to see how it reads. And used bookstores stocked full with pieces of other people's life.

kokanator 6y ago

Escaping the suggestion algorithm is what the physical bookstore does for me. Yes suggestions can be helpful to a point but limit the ability for discovery. Books in general are about discovery whether that is discovering knowledge or discovering new worlds. A bookstore is an extension of this. Lists do this to some degree but someone has done the discovery for you. ( and I don't have the answer here ) But we need to find a way to allow the discovery to occur.

chaostheory 6y ago

I dig your Netflix style categorizations, but it would be nice to have a Netflix like UI to go along with it. Still nice though

bwb 6y ago
Thanks, so you want to browse purely on book cover? Or some format with book cover + breakdown?
- chaostheory 6y ago
  Something like that. Something that's closer to going to local bookstore. The cover catches your eye first, then you go to to the summary. If you really want a revolution, a VR centric UI would be the real game changer.

randallsquared 6y ago

Suggestion: remove leading article words before alphabetical sorting. "A Gardening Guide" and "Gardening Guide" are better sorted together.

bwb 6y ago
Yep, topics is really a hacked together concept right now and we are adding a full implementation over the coming months. That will be shipped toward July and fix all that :)

sndean 6y ago

The fact that there's a list for a topic so narrow ("The Best Books On The Parthian Empire" [0]) on the front page makes me like this a lot. Definitely bookmarked. Not that I've looked elsewhere for a list of books on the Parthians, but that does certainly fulfill the "discover" part in the title. [0] https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-parthian-empire https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-parthian-empire

bwb 6y ago
Thanks :), we have another two you might like: The Best Books On Parthia And The War with Rome In The 1st Century BCE https://shepherd.com/best-books/parthia-and-war-rome-1st-century-bce https://shepherd.com/best-books/parthia-and-war-rome-1st-cen...

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grawprog 6y ago

This isn't like 'wandering through a book store' at all. This is a bunch of best of lists written by authors. It's not even close to being comparable to wandering through a book store...this isn't even a new way to discover books. It's just a bunch of recommendations on books on various topics by authors. Why would you make the description so disingenuous? Just call it what it is, a curated collection of best of lists... Then again, I guess that's not really something you can make a Show: HN about.

libraryatnight 6y ago
Agreed. There's no organic exploration, no sense of discovery. Given the description I feel incredibly let down.

ospohngellert 6y ago

Figure this is as good a place as any to ask this: I have been looking for good books to read for learning about foreign policy. Didn't see any foreign policy lists on the linked cite, wanted to see if any users had recommendations :)

bwb 6y ago
Sorry I haven't gotten to that topic yet, and no recommendations. I did add it to my list to work on :)

DarrenDev 6y ago

Fantastic domain. Did you own it beforehand or acquire it special?