4 ms·

I am trying to fix this with book browsing online, try shepherd.com and let me know (ben@shepherd.com). I go to authors and ask them to share 5 books around a t

by bwb 5y ago

I am trying to fix this with book browsing online, try shepherd.com and let me know (ben@shepherd.com). I go to authors and ask them to share 5 books around a topic/them they are passionate experts in, and then i try to connect it in different ways to make browsing fun :) Only 10 months old and trying to integrate genre now…

teh_klev 5y ago
Ben this is pretty neat. I've lined up a couple of reads already.
- bwb 5y ago
  Awesome thanks! I am trying now to bring genres and other data in, my hope being that if you are on the WW2 page you can filter it to show only history, or only historical fiction, or even science fiction. And, I would like to do similar on genre pages (yet to be built), so that if you are on a fantasy genre page, you can filter down to elves, dragons, or things like that. Big technical challenges but I am going to see what I can do. This is something I've been wanting for a long time, and playing with some cool formats other than the current one to help people bump into awesome books/authors.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
Dude... This is really good! If I wasn't on the most limited budget I've ever been on, I would have just bought like 3 books without even blinking. I don't know how you managed to get such a large list of bookshelves already, but I'm impressed.
- bwb 5y ago
  Thank you, that is awesome to hear :) Ya, I worked really hard in the early days to get a ton of lists and now I've built out a small PT team that helps me contact authors and shepherd them through the publishing process. We are adding ~400 lists a month, and it takes a TON of time to set it all up, vet it for quality, format, setup all the data, etc. I've got some really great stuff coming, and I hope to leave beta toward this summer or fall.
wizzwizz4 5y ago
I'm sure you already know this, but “genre” boundaries are fuzzy. (Some people refute the concept entirely, which I think is a bit silly.) There are several different ways to define each genre. If you can do some magic with your genre data that lets me sort some books into what I think of as genre classifications (say, if I consider Star Wars a fantasy work), then automagically lets me filter by that… Not sure how useful, or possible, that actually is, but it seemed like a good idea when I started writing the comment. Apart from thinking that Minecraft was set in Washington D.C., it gave multiple good-seeming suggestions for all the random topics I thought to put into it. That's pretty impressive, especially given (or, perhaps, because) your data is manually curated. Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?
- bwb 5y ago
  Yep, I am going to need to start by using BISAC or THEMA which are a pretty standardized format used in the industry. I am testing both now to figure out which I want to use, or if I could use a combo (if that his helpful). BISAC has 1 to 5 categories assigned to a book, pretty standard. THEMA is similar, but has a qualifier which is a cool concept. So you can add a location, age group, or other qualifiers to help define who the books is for. Ya, right now we use NLP to analyze a bunch of data to to determine what the book is about. It works pretty well but I am working to improve some of that :). "Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?" I am not familiar, can you tell me more or send me a URL? I don't know what that is :) (ben@shepherd.com I added it to my list to check out via google search as well)
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    https://bookwyrm.social/ https://bookwyrm.social/ is a project to basically make a group of decentralised book-based social media sites, a little like Goodreads (but on the Fediverse). Something being made available over ActivityPub isn't a copyright license to use it, but you could contact individual people and ask to be able to use their reviews, if that's something you wanted to do. (There's probably some degree of “permission by default” that you get, but as I'm not a copyright lawyer I tend to play it safe.)

by bwb 5y ago

teh_klev 5y ago

Ben this is pretty neat. I've lined up a couple of reads already.

bwb 5y ago
Awesome thanks! I am trying now to bring genres and other data in, my hope being that if you are on the WW2 page you can filter it to show only history, or only historical fiction, or even science fiction. And, I would like to do similar on genre pages (yet to be built), so that if you are on a fantasy genre page, you can filter down to elves, dragons, or things like that. Big technical challenges but I am going to see what I can do. This is something I've been wanting for a long time, and playing with some cool formats other than the current one to help people bump into awesome books/authors.

Enginerrrd 5y ago

Dude... This is really good! If I wasn't on the most limited budget I've ever been on, I would have just bought like 3 books without even blinking. I don't know how you managed to get such a large list of bookshelves already, but I'm impressed.

bwb 5y ago
Thank you, that is awesome to hear :) Ya, I worked really hard in the early days to get a ton of lists and now I've built out a small PT team that helps me contact authors and shepherd them through the publishing process. We are adding ~400 lists a month, and it takes a TON of time to set it all up, vet it for quality, format, setup all the data, etc. I've got some really great stuff coming, and I hope to leave beta toward this summer or fall.

wizzwizz4 5y ago

I'm sure you already know this, but “genre” boundaries are fuzzy. (Some people refute the concept entirely, which I think is a bit silly.) There are several different ways to define each genre. If you can do some magic with your genre data that lets me sort some books into what I think of as genre classifications (say, if I consider Star Wars a fantasy work), then automagically lets me filter by that… Not sure how useful, or possible, that actually is, but it seemed like a good idea when I started writing the comment. Apart from thinking that Minecraft was set in Washington D.C., it gave multiple good-seeming suggestions for all the random topics I thought to put into it. That's pretty impressive, especially given (or, perhaps, because) your data is manually curated. Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?

bwb 5y ago
Yep, I am going to need to start by using BISAC or THEMA which are a pretty standardized format used in the industry. I am testing both now to figure out which I want to use, or if I could use a combo (if that his helpful). BISAC has 1 to 5 categories assigned to a book, pretty standard. THEMA is similar, but has a qualifier which is a cool concept. So you can add a location, age group, or other qualifiers to help define who the books is for. Ya, right now we use NLP to analyze a bunch of data to to determine what the book is about. It works pretty well but I am working to improve some of that :). "Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?" I am not familiar, can you tell me more or send me a URL? I don't know what that is :) (ben@shepherd.com I added it to my list to check out via google search as well)
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  https://bookwyrm.social/ https://bookwyrm.social/ is a project to basically make a group of decentralised book-based social media sites, a little like Goodreads (but on the Fediverse). Something being made available over ActivityPub isn't a copyright license to use it, but you could contact individual people and ask to be able to use their reviews, if that's something you wanted to do. (There's probably some degree of “permission by default” that you get, but as I'm not a copyright lawyer I tend to play it safe.)