7 ms·
Show HN: Book recommendations with live library availability
- kidnoodle 12d agoMorning hacker news folks. I made this thing I call leafle - it is a bot you can talk to about books, that can give you suggestions for books you can borrow right now at your local library (at least for 6,900ish libraries it can: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage). It leans very heavily on the fact that LLMs have very broad latent knowledge of.. well, most books written in English, really. So it tries to do a good job of finding you books which aren't just another one by the same author, or happen to be in vogue right now. You can try it out a little without signing up, import your reading history from other services (Goodreads, storygraph, particularly nicely with hardcover), or just take a pic of your bookshelf. If you do sign up, it'll get better at suggesting you things as you talk to it more about things you've read (hopefully it does a reasonable job of holding an intelligent conversation on that score), and you can also then connect it to claude and friends via an MCP or play around with the API.
- bsonmez19 12d agoCurious how well it handles non-English books. Does the quality drop a lot outside of English or does it still manage decent suggestions?
- kidnoodle 12d agoIt is gonna be a bit variable - it has definitely got less knowledge of non-English literature. Couple of French friends tried it out and it did a reasonable job though!