6 ms·

Show HN: Crunching 1,200 Authors' Favorite Reads of 2023

149 points by bwb 3y ago

Hi all, creator here :) I launched Shepherd.com on a Show HN in April 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660), and it has come a long way. My goal with Shepherd is to create an experience that feels like wandering your local bookstore, along with little notes from authors & experts sharing why each book is one of their all-time favorites. For 2023, I surveyed 1,200+ authors to get their three favorite reads of the year. Then I crunched that data and broke it by genre, age range, and when it was published. Publisher data is a nightmare, so some of the genres are not perfect; I am working on improving that and some of the NLP/ML that drives this. Check out their top sci-fi reads: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/science-fiction https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/science-fiction Or, their top nonfiction reads: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/nonfiction https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/nonfiction You can also zoom in on each author’s favorite 3 reads. Louise Carey - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/louise-carey https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/louise-carey Kevin Klehr - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/kevin-klehr https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/kevin-klehr Alice C. Hill - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/alice-c-hill https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/alice-c-hill Sara Ackerman - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/sara-ackerman https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/sara-ackerman My email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to share ideas or suggestions for 2024. Thanks, Ben P.S. I have a newsletter for readers here where I share what I am building, new features, my fav book lists: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/newsletter-for-readers https://forauthors.shepherd.com/newsletter-for-readers

uptownfunk 3y ago
Surprised Walter isaacson book on musk didn’t show up.. I don’t read many books but that one I couldn’t put down..
- marton_s 3y ago
  https://shepherd.com/book/elon-musk-2 https://shepherd.com/book/elon-musk-2
- bwb 3y ago
  It definitely made the top 100 for non-fiction, 2 authors have picked it so far. And it is in the top for categories like business and biography: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/business?only-published https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/business?only-published
qingcharles 3y ago
As a web dev I really like your design choices and some great font choices.
datenyan 3y ago
This is very cool - I like the layout too (though I couldn't find a way to see a total list of authors surveyed, which I would have liked to see) (As an aside, always happy to see "A Gentleman in Moscow" appear in anything to do with "best book" lists!)
- bwb 3y ago
  Thanks! I will work on a way to visualize a total list of the authors surveyed as that is missing. I also asked them for personality/expertise tags so I am going to play with letting you see book recommendations by those too. I do have a "by the author" list but only for each individual book: for example, here you can see all the recommendations by authors for A Gentlemen in Moscow and click to see the book list it came from: https://shepherd.com/book/a-gentleman-in-moscow https://shepherd.com/book/a-gentleman-in-moscow A Gentlemen in Moscow is one of the most recommended books on the entire website.
pimlottc 3y ago
I was surprised, on mobile, that going back from a book detail took me back to HN. Maybe it’s different on desktop, but the way the book detail view takes up the whole page, it seems natural that swiping back should return to the list of books.
- bwb 3y ago
  btw all fixed now :)
- bwb 3y ago
  Yep, that is 100% my fault. I will fix that in the next 48 hours. I ran out of time and totally missed that I had done that.
sien 3y ago
This is really nifty. It also shows how disparately people read. No doubt because every year there are thousands of new titles. The top non-fiction book has 8 readers from 1200. If you asked 1200 people what TV shows they had been watching there would be much more overlap.
- rplnt 3y ago
  There's orders of magnitude less TV shows than books. But yes, they are usually more viral as well.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  But they only get to pick 3. Also people are unlikely to watch old TV compared to read old books. I bet if you asked about music you would get even less agreement.
- bwb 3y ago
  Thank you :) This is the first year I've done this, and I was surprised at how widely authors reads. I had expected authors to read wider than most readers but visualizing it still surprised me. I've still got ~250 authors votes to add to the system in the next few weeks. What I am very curious to graph in 20224 when I do this, is how many of the books published in 2023 show up at the "most read books in 2024". IE, how long does it take for those to pop? For 2024 I am hoping to 2x to 3x how many authors take part. And I am looking at possibly adding reader votes as well but with a very different format. I need to see if I have enough money to be able to build that this year as that has some tech challenges.
Semaphor 3y ago
The idea is cool, but I have some suggestions. 1. Use links, when there’s a list, I open links in new tabs that I want to check. This is some kind of JS-only app that doesn’t have links, only JS behavior. Please don’t break the browser for no good reason, this makes it really hard to actually use the site. 2. Get a better source for the book data: > What is this book about? > Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. > 15+ pages of new, original content, including a glossary of terms, in-universe writings, and more! > A USA Today Best-Selling Novel! > "Unlike anything I've ever read. " --V.E. Schwab > "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" --Charles Stross > "Brilliantly original, messy and weird straight through." --NPR Almost everything I checked had a bunch of absolutely useless marketing blurbs at the top, maybe one or two paragraphs of explaining what the book is about at the end, but not even always that. I don’t know how accessible it is, but goodreads tends to have descriptions without those blurbs.
- DelTaco 3y ago
  Issue #1 irks me so much. Often I'll find myself having gone through many things in a list opening all in new tabs. Only to check my first tab 5 minutes later and find the same page reloaded.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    That’s even worse, yeah, at least this site fails early by not reacting at all ;)
  - bwb 3y ago
    Yep, I am sorry, I also use tabs this way and I just ran out of time this year. I made the mistake of doing my user testing on a small non tech crowd who doesn't do that so I just missed it :(
- bwb 3y ago
  > 1. Use links, when there’s a list Yep, this is on my list to do for next year. I just ran out of time to do that this year (this is the first year I've done this). I will also rethink what data I show for 2024 as I want to better show which authors picked which books visually. > 2. Get a better source for the book data: I wish there were a better source; book data is a nightmare. There is only one source of book data and that is the publishers through a format called ONIX. The publishers have no idea what they are doing, and so they stuff the book's "description" full of marketing crap as well as abuse the BISAC-defined genres :(. Goodreads has an army of unpaid people who clean this all up. I am looking at rewriting the book's description using AI as it seems like it is the only choice to get rid of that nonsense without a ton of manual work (since I don’t have user accounts to crowdsource that). Genre miscategorization is harder, I am playing with AI to help me clean that up, but also thinking about using crowdsourcing some of that. Just one example: I found several editions of Dune that report they were published in the 1780s and 1880s... and this is a book selling millions of copies a year.
deleted 3y ago
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zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Some of the books in sci fi are actually fantasy. Also it seems if I filter to 2023 published most of the books have very few people. It might be better to ask for 3 books for each category (optionally of course).
- bwb 3y ago
  Ya, the genre data I get from publishers is terrible. And I can't find any other sources. Many of the publishers mix nonfiction and fiction categories and I am trying to figure out how I can possibly fix this with AI checks and/or crowdsourcing long term. For example, a publisher will say a book is in categories of AI, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Space Opera. AI is a nonfiction category so that instantly tags it fiction and nonfiction. And the internet they have doing this often doesn't know the difference between sci-fi and fantasy. It is a mess.
freetime2 3y ago
It's a little sad that 1984 still sits near the top of the list for sci-fi favorite reads of the year in 2023. Not that it's a bad book by any means, but just because the genre feels neglected. On the plus side, this is the first I am learning of Project Hail Mary, and definitely plan to give it a read. Thank you for compiling this list!
- DelTaco 3y ago
  Project Hail Mary was also my favorite book of 2023, and probably the best sci-fi I've read in a decade. You're in for a real treat!
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Deffo my pick for 2022. Movie in production now...
  - bwb 3y ago
    Ditto here, it was my favorite of 2022, and I loved it. I can't wait for what he writes next.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Is it much better than the martian? Everyone said this about that book and it frankly sucked. It was probably still true though because for a lot of people it was the only sci fi they read in years?
    - xypage 3y ago
      I'd say they're about even, it has some things I enjoy more and some places I think The Martian was better, they're very similar in how they read though, if you didn't like The Martian you almost certainly won't enjoy Project Hail Mary.
      - qingcharles 3y ago
        I agree with this 100%. They are very similar in idea -- I can understand why some people might feel some kinda way about Weir pushing out a samey book. I adore both though.
bwb 3y ago
btw, if you are curious about the build process Márton Salomváry (the dev I work with on this project) has a great post here on his website: https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html And a more recent one about Django which touches on Shepherd: https://salomvary.com/django-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html https://salomvary.com/django-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.h...
avinassh 3y ago
I love the design and the site. but.. I am not liking the recommendations. I consider The Midnight Library to be one of the worst books I have read this year, but it has highest ratings in Sci Fi beating Project Hail Mary By Andy Weir and Klara and the Sun By Kazuo Ishiguro https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/science-fiction https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/science-fiction
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bwb 3y ago
  Thanks! Everyone loves books for different reasons, it is something I am hoping to start peeling apart in future years. I find that Midnight Library is enough traditional sci-fi so it pulls a different type of reader. So you get a lot of non-sci-fi readers who love it. I hope it is a gateway drug :) Try the sections on space opera, cyberpunk, and hard sci fi... they are usually going to be more hardcore.
infruset 3y ago
I get that HN is an english-language website from the US, and that I'm not entitled for this website to include me. Don't take this as personal criticism -- if anything I like your project --, I'm hating the game and not the player. But the english language and US/UK culture are hegemonic today, which means people from all around the world read and write the words "book" and "author" on HN without realizing, or realizing too well, depending on who they are, that what is actually meant is "english-language books" (including a moderate amount of translations, thank goodness) and "english-speaking authors" (a majority of whom are American or British, even when they are immigrants). I'm not sure this comment will do anything, but someone had to say it, maybe just to maintain a modicum of awareness that millions of books are written in other languages and never make it to the english-speaking eye, and are thus buried alive as not-really-books and their writers not-really-authors in the global conversation. Maybe the relevant adjectives ("english-language", "American", "British") might be used more to remind readers that by "books" we do not mean "all books", but "books accessible in the US"?
- brookst 3y ago
  Isn’t it kind of implicit in the English language description? Like if there was a site/post “les cent meilleurs livres de 2023”, it would be fairly unsurprising if they were all in French. I would love a more inclusive, multilingual culture, but I’m not sure qualifying sentences to refer to the language they’re written in is the right place to start?
  - infruset 3y ago
    There would never be a site/post "les cent meilleurs livres de 2023" on a global discussion board such as this because by definition it would not be in English. There might be a "the best french books of 2023" post, although there wouldn't be, because French books simply don't exist in the anglosphere, but my point is precisely that the global conversation happens in English, the only word that ever reaches it is "book", and it's never about anything else than English books.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
bogrollben 3y ago
I just signed up for shepherd last week (I still need to fill out the word template and get it back to you). Had no idea you were on Hacker News! Any competition against GoodReads is good news, in my book! :D - another Ben
- bwb 3y ago
  Awesome! Hey Ben, ya this is where I first launched in April 2021 :)
xtiansimon 3y ago
A “list of Sci-Fi” books is suspect with fantasy books in its mix. And if it’s meant to be a cross over, it should make that case. What am I to make from: “Award for Best Fantasy Novel… Winner of the British Fantasy Society Award…” uuhh? It’s a fox in the hen house! Get your dragon out of my spaceship!
NelsonMinar 3y ago
I like this, thank you for building it. My wish is that the book blurbs were better. For instance I click on Demon Copperhead to learn "What is this book about?" And what I see is "*A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE ..." That's marketing garbage (in all caps, no less) that doesn't tell me anything about what the book actually is. I imagine you're pulling this summary from the publisher's website or somewhere similar. Not sure how to automate a more useful blurb. FWIW, Goodreads starts "Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer..." which is much more what I was looking for.
- bwb 3y ago
  Ya this is publishers :( I am working to fix this and have AI clean it up. Goodreads relies on an army of unpaid labor :), GoodReads librarians fix a lot of that type of stuff.
darajay 3y ago
Nice site! I like the clean design and logical layout, but have some questions. Firstly you say it’s the top 3 books per author, but you ask for the top 5 in the “for authors” page? Which is it? It seems you are asking them for the top 3/5 in a niche category? It’s not clear to me if you ask for books in the category or in general for 2023 or both. For example I saw one author giving a list of the top books on Leonardo da Vinci in 2023. This would make aggregation of limited value, and the first thing I am presented with is a list of books which have reached some kind of consensus amongst authors, but the lack of consensus was quite surprising before I found out how it worked! I think there is a lot of value in getting an author's consensus of best reads, and then maybe secondarily including books from a niche interest. This would be a value-add for the author too, since there is more diversity of books. Nice project, I wish you the best of luck with it.
- bwb 3y ago
  Thanks :) Right now, I have two formats: The first is a 5 book list where an author/expert recommends 5 books around a theme, topic, or mood. I've got 10,000 of those on the website that I have done with authors over the last 2.5 years. This one has nothing to do with the best books of the year and is an entirely different setup. I just added this "favorite 3 reads" of the year, and that is where they pick their favorite 3 reads from the last 12 months. So I take their reads and then try to classify it to these categories on the best books of the year page (plus it fills into other parts of the website). Does that make sense? The idea is I am going to collect super high quality votes from authors, and then find cool ways to help readers connect with topics, genres, and eventually themes. And just kinda wander the virtual shelves. Slowly getting there...
zerkten 3y ago
Nice concept. I don't like that open in new tab is broken though.

149 points by bwb 3y ago

uptownfunk 3y ago

Surprised Walter isaacson book on musk didn’t show up.. I don’t read many books but that one I couldn’t put down..

marton_s 3y ago
https://shepherd.com/book/elon-musk-2 https://shepherd.com/book/elon-musk-2
bwb 3y ago
It definitely made the top 100 for non-fiction, 2 authors have picked it so far. And it is in the top for categories like business and biography: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/business?only-published https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/business?only-published

qingcharles 3y ago

As a web dev I really like your design choices and some great font choices.

datenyan 3y ago

This is very cool - I like the layout too (though I couldn't find a way to see a total list of authors surveyed, which I would have liked to see) (As an aside, always happy to see "A Gentleman in Moscow" appear in anything to do with "best book" lists!)

bwb 3y ago
Thanks! I will work on a way to visualize a total list of the authors surveyed as that is missing. I also asked them for personality/expertise tags so I am going to play with letting you see book recommendations by those too. I do have a "by the author" list but only for each individual book: for example, here you can see all the recommendations by authors for A Gentlemen in Moscow and click to see the book list it came from: https://shepherd.com/book/a-gentleman-in-moscow https://shepherd.com/book/a-gentleman-in-moscow A Gentlemen in Moscow is one of the most recommended books on the entire website.

pimlottc 3y ago

I was surprised, on mobile, that going back from a book detail took me back to HN. Maybe it’s different on desktop, but the way the book detail view takes up the whole page, it seems natural that swiping back should return to the list of books.

bwb 3y ago
btw all fixed now :)
bwb 3y ago
Yep, that is 100% my fault. I will fix that in the next 48 hours. I ran out of time and totally missed that I had done that.

sien 3y ago

This is really nifty. It also shows how disparately people read. No doubt because every year there are thousands of new titles. The top non-fiction book has 8 readers from 1200. If you asked 1200 people what TV shows they had been watching there would be much more overlap.

rplnt 3y ago
There's orders of magnitude less TV shows than books. But yes, they are usually more viral as well.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
But they only get to pick 3. Also people are unlikely to watch old TV compared to read old books. I bet if you asked about music you would get even less agreement.
bwb 3y ago
Thank you :) This is the first year I've done this, and I was surprised at how widely authors reads. I had expected authors to read wider than most readers but visualizing it still surprised me. I've still got ~250 authors votes to add to the system in the next few weeks. What I am very curious to graph in 20224 when I do this, is how many of the books published in 2023 show up at the "most read books in 2024". IE, how long does it take for those to pop? For 2024 I am hoping to 2x to 3x how many authors take part. And I am looking at possibly adding reader votes as well but with a very different format. I need to see if I have enough money to be able to build that this year as that has some tech challenges.

Semaphor 3y ago

The idea is cool, but I have some suggestions. 1. Use links, when there’s a list, I open links in new tabs that I want to check. This is some kind of JS-only app that doesn’t have links, only JS behavior. Please don’t break the browser for no good reason, this makes it really hard to actually use the site. 2. Get a better source for the book data: > What is this book about? > Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones. > 15+ pages of new, original content, including a glossary of terms, in-universe writings, and more! > A USA Today Best-Selling Novel! > "Unlike anything I've ever read. " --V.E. Schwab > "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" --Charles Stross > "Brilliantly original, messy and weird straight through." --NPR Almost everything I checked had a bunch of absolutely useless marketing blurbs at the top, maybe one or two paragraphs of explaining what the book is about at the end, but not even always that. I don’t know how accessible it is, but goodreads tends to have descriptions without those blurbs.

DelTaco 3y ago
Issue #1 irks me so much. Often I'll find myself having gone through many things in a list opening all in new tabs. Only to check my first tab 5 minutes later and find the same page reloaded.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  That’s even worse, yeah, at least this site fails early by not reacting at all ;)
- bwb 3y ago
  Yep, I am sorry, I also use tabs this way and I just ran out of time this year. I made the mistake of doing my user testing on a small non tech crowd who doesn't do that so I just missed it :(
bwb 3y ago
> 1. Use links, when there’s a list Yep, this is on my list to do for next year. I just ran out of time to do that this year (this is the first year I've done this). I will also rethink what data I show for 2024 as I want to better show which authors picked which books visually. > 2. Get a better source for the book data: I wish there were a better source; book data is a nightmare. There is only one source of book data and that is the publishers through a format called ONIX. The publishers have no idea what they are doing, and so they stuff the book's "description" full of marketing crap as well as abuse the BISAC-defined genres :(. Goodreads has an army of unpaid people who clean this all up. I am looking at rewriting the book's description using AI as it seems like it is the only choice to get rid of that nonsense without a ton of manual work (since I don’t have user accounts to crowdsource that). Genre miscategorization is harder, I am playing with AI to help me clean that up, but also thinking about using crowdsourcing some of that. Just one example: I found several editions of Dune that report they were published in the 1780s and 1880s... and this is a book selling millions of copies a year.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

Some of the books in sci fi are actually fantasy. Also it seems if I filter to 2023 published most of the books have very few people. It might be better to ask for 3 books for each category (optionally of course).

bwb 3y ago
Ya, the genre data I get from publishers is terrible. And I can't find any other sources. Many of the publishers mix nonfiction and fiction categories and I am trying to figure out how I can possibly fix this with AI checks and/or crowdsourcing long term. For example, a publisher will say a book is in categories of AI, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Space Opera. AI is a nonfiction category so that instantly tags it fiction and nonfiction. And the internet they have doing this often doesn't know the difference between sci-fi and fantasy. It is a mess.

freetime2 3y ago

It's a little sad that 1984 still sits near the top of the list for sci-fi favorite reads of the year in 2023. Not that it's a bad book by any means, but just because the genre feels neglected. On the plus side, this is the first I am learning of Project Hail Mary, and definitely plan to give it a read. Thank you for compiling this list!

DelTaco 3y ago
Project Hail Mary was also my favorite book of 2023, and probably the best sci-fi I've read in a decade. You're in for a real treat!
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Deffo my pick for 2022. Movie in production now...
- bwb 3y ago
  Ditto here, it was my favorite of 2022, and I loved it. I can't wait for what he writes next.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Is it much better than the martian? Everyone said this about that book and it frankly sucked. It was probably still true though because for a lot of people it was the only sci fi they read in years?
  - xypage 3y ago
    I'd say they're about even, it has some things I enjoy more and some places I think The Martian was better, they're very similar in how they read though, if you didn't like The Martian you almost certainly won't enjoy Project Hail Mary.
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      I agree with this 100%. They are very similar in idea -- I can understand why some people might feel some kinda way about Weir pushing out a samey book. I adore both though.

bwb 3y ago

btw, if you are curious about the build process Márton Salomváry (the dev I work with on this project) has a great post here on his website: https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html https://salomvary.com/building-shepherd.html And a more recent one about Django which touches on Shepherd: https://salomvary.com/django-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html https://salomvary.com/django-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.h...

avinassh 3y ago

I love the design and the site. but.. I am not liking the recommendations. I consider The Midnight Library to be one of the worst books I have read this year, but it has highest ratings in Sci Fi beating Project Hail Mary By Andy Weir and Klara and the Sun By Kazuo Ishiguro https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/science-fiction https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/science-fiction

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bwb 3y ago
Thanks! Everyone loves books for different reasons, it is something I am hoping to start peeling apart in future years. I find that Midnight Library is enough traditional sci-fi so it pulls a different type of reader. So you get a lot of non-sci-fi readers who love it. I hope it is a gateway drug :) Try the sections on space opera, cyberpunk, and hard sci fi... they are usually going to be more hardcore.

infruset 3y ago

I get that HN is an english-language website from the US, and that I'm not entitled for this website to include me. Don't take this as personal criticism -- if anything I like your project --, I'm hating the game and not the player. But the english language and US/UK culture are hegemonic today, which means people from all around the world read and write the words "book" and "author" on HN without realizing, or realizing too well, depending on who they are, that what is actually meant is "english-language books" (including a moderate amount of translations, thank goodness) and "english-speaking authors" (a majority of whom are American or British, even when they are immigrants). I'm not sure this comment will do anything, but someone had to say it, maybe just to maintain a modicum of awareness that millions of books are written in other languages and never make it to the english-speaking eye, and are thus buried alive as not-really-books and their writers not-really-authors in the global conversation. Maybe the relevant adjectives ("english-language", "American", "British") might be used more to remind readers that by "books" we do not mean "all books", but "books accessible in the US"?

brookst 3y ago
Isn’t it kind of implicit in the English language description? Like if there was a site/post “les cent meilleurs livres de 2023”, it would be fairly unsurprising if they were all in French. I would love a more inclusive, multilingual culture, but I’m not sure qualifying sentences to refer to the language they’re written in is the right place to start?
- infruset 3y ago
  There would never be a site/post "les cent meilleurs livres de 2023" on a global discussion board such as this because by definition it would not be in English. There might be a "the best french books of 2023" post, although there wouldn't be, because French books simply don't exist in the anglosphere, but my point is precisely that the global conversation happens in English, the only word that ever reaches it is "book", and it's never about anything else than English books.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago

bogrollben 3y ago

I just signed up for shepherd last week (I still need to fill out the word template and get it back to you). Had no idea you were on Hacker News! Any competition against GoodReads is good news, in my book! :D - another Ben

bwb 3y ago
Awesome! Hey Ben, ya this is where I first launched in April 2021 :)

xtiansimon 3y ago

A “list of Sci-Fi” books is suspect with fantasy books in its mix. And if it’s meant to be a cross over, it should make that case. What am I to make from: “Award for Best Fantasy Novel… Winner of the British Fantasy Society Award…” uuhh? It’s a fox in the hen house! Get your dragon out of my spaceship!

NelsonMinar 3y ago

I like this, thank you for building it. My wish is that the book blurbs were better. For instance I click on Demon Copperhead to learn "What is this book about?" And what I see is "*A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE ..." That's marketing garbage (in all caps, no less) that doesn't tell me anything about what the book actually is. I imagine you're pulling this summary from the publisher's website or somewhere similar. Not sure how to automate a more useful blurb. FWIW, Goodreads starts "Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer..." which is much more what I was looking for.

bwb 3y ago
Ya this is publishers :( I am working to fix this and have AI clean it up. Goodreads relies on an army of unpaid labor :), GoodReads librarians fix a lot of that type of stuff.

darajay 3y ago

Nice site! I like the clean design and logical layout, but have some questions. Firstly you say it’s the top 3 books per author, but you ask for the top 5 in the “for authors” page? Which is it? It seems you are asking them for the top 3/5 in a niche category? It’s not clear to me if you ask for books in the category or in general for 2023 or both. For example I saw one author giving a list of the top books on Leonardo da Vinci in 2023. This would make aggregation of limited value, and the first thing I am presented with is a list of books which have reached some kind of consensus amongst authors, but the lack of consensus was quite surprising before I found out how it worked! I think there is a lot of value in getting an author's consensus of best reads, and then maybe secondarily including books from a niche interest. This would be a value-add for the author too, since there is more diversity of books. Nice project, I wish you the best of luck with it.

bwb 3y ago
Thanks :) Right now, I have two formats: The first is a 5 book list where an author/expert recommends 5 books around a theme, topic, or mood. I've got 10,000 of those on the website that I have done with authors over the last 2.5 years. This one has nothing to do with the best books of the year and is an entirely different setup. I just added this "favorite 3 reads" of the year, and that is where they pick their favorite 3 reads from the last 12 months. So I take their reads and then try to classify it to these categories on the best books of the year page (plus it fills into other parts of the website). Does that make sense? The idea is I am going to collect super high quality votes from authors, and then find cool ways to help readers connect with topics, genres, and eventually themes. And just kinda wander the virtual shelves. Slowly getting there...

zerkten 3y ago

Nice concept. I don't like that open in new tab is broken though.