4 ms·

Small Demons: Seeking A Better Path to Book Discovery

28 points by patrickyeon 15y ago

sixtofour 15y ago
Details from fiction, cataloged and connected to other books and the real world. Fascinating idea. Signed up, looking forward to the invite. This is something that Wikipedia could have done. I suppose it does do this as a casual side effect, but SD is doing it explicitly. My major question (as usual) is how are they going to make money. Maybe that will be clear when I get an account. I'm assuming it will be through affiliation or even direct sales.
nodata 15y ago
Which reminds me how bad Amazon's recommendations pages suck. I'm constantly surprised that a company with their resources can produce something which is useless at recommending me anything.
- JonLim 15y ago
  I wouldn't say they suck - they're based on the purchasing patterns of similar people. However, they're not great. But you still find good stuff - got to the third page of my Kindle recommended page before I found something, but that's better than nothing! Their emails on the other hand...
  - nodata 15y ago
    Today for example, after buying a pack of four HP ink cartridges, I was recommended to buy each of the four ink cartridges individually. Brilliant. As a book, apparently I'd really enjoy Twilight. Can't wait for that one. And I have a hundred Kindle sleeves being recommended to me after I bought a decent case for the thing. So the recommendations vary between things I definitely don't need, and teenage vampire novels. I want their recommendation page to recommend me good stuff. I adjust the recommendations, but still I get nothing useful at all. sigh
- nik_0_0 15y ago
  Have you used Goodreads? When you first sign up they ask you to rate books, and each time based on a book you read it shows 4 more that are related, I was VERY surprised how accurate it was for some chains of books, especially when compared with Amazon. Having said that, this sounds like an awesome idea, waiting for an invite now!
  - nodata 15y ago
    No I haven't, but I will. Thanks.
lukeholder 15y ago
wow, what a fantastic idea.
mlok 15y ago
I remember the amazon self-published spam-book problem (people scraping wikipedia etc. and self-publishing thousands of low quality e-books on the kindle marketplace) And I wonder how this will translate for Small Demons, when someone with an SEO mindset will try to leverage this system? We'll see new "optimized" books, full of celebrities names, brands, products, companies, etc.
jamesrcole 15y ago
Interesting to consider this as a type of approach to 'the problem of metadata'. That is, obtaining rich metadata about some domain (here, books) and finding a practical use to put this metadata to.

28 points by patrickyeon 15y ago

Details from fiction, cataloged and connected to other books and the real world. Fascinating idea. Signed up, looking forward to the invite. This is something that Wikipedia could have done. I suppose it does do this as a casual side effect, but SD is doing it explicitly. My major question (as usual) is how are they going to make money. Maybe that will be clear when I get an account. I'm assuming it will be through affiliation or even direct sales.

nodata 15y ago

Which reminds me how bad Amazon's recommendations pages suck. I'm constantly surprised that a company with their resources can produce something which is useless at recommending me anything.

JonLim 15y ago
I wouldn't say they suck - they're based on the purchasing patterns of similar people. However, they're not great. But you still find good stuff - got to the third page of my Kindle recommended page before I found something, but that's better than nothing! Their emails on the other hand...
- nodata 15y ago
  Today for example, after buying a pack of four HP ink cartridges, I was recommended to buy each of the four ink cartridges individually. Brilliant. As a book, apparently I'd really enjoy Twilight. Can't wait for that one. And I have a hundred Kindle sleeves being recommended to me after I bought a decent case for the thing. So the recommendations vary between things I definitely don't need, and teenage vampire novels. I want their recommendation page to recommend me good stuff. I adjust the recommendations, but still I get nothing useful at all. sigh
nik_0_0 15y ago
Have you used Goodreads? When you first sign up they ask you to rate books, and each time based on a book you read it shows 4 more that are related, I was VERY surprised how accurate it was for some chains of books, especially when compared with Amazon. Having said that, this sounds like an awesome idea, waiting for an invite now!
- nodata 15y ago
  No I haven't, but I will. Thanks.

lukeholder 15y ago

wow, what a fantastic idea.

mlok 15y ago

I remember the amazon self-published spam-book problem (people scraping wikipedia etc. and self-publishing thousands of low quality e-books on the kindle marketplace) And I wonder how this will translate for Small Demons, when someone with an SEO mindset will try to leverage this system? We'll see new "optimized" books, full of celebrities names, brands, products, companies, etc.

jamesrcole 15y ago

Interesting to consider this as a type of approach to 'the problem of metadata'. That is, obtaining rich metadata about some domain (here, books) and finding a practical use to put this metadata to.