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Book discovery service: No Names. No Jackets
- mickeyben 13y agoI spend about 1 hour a week at the bookstore, usually taking random books and reading the first page(s). I also try to discover new books on Amazon from time to time by going over their selections and recommendations but I end up reading the same circle of authors. I think your idea is brilliant by matching my IRL process. I wish you a lot of success. EDIT: about the website itself it's nicely done, minimalist and easy. I'd change the "Choose a genre" button to a dropdown. Also I'd have the top navigation (the exploration/submit buttons) merged with the right one with the menu following the scroll. This would be a a good incentive to navigate around (easier and faster too).
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoUsually I sample mid-stream, as it were; about 60% in to the book I'll read a couple of pages.
- abraininavat 13y agoWhat is it you're looking for, exactly? Good grammar? Cheers to the OP for thinking outside the box, but I don't think this service helps me, nor would your technique. I yearn for good writing, but what I consider good writing can't be determined from reading one chapter, and certainly not a couple pages in the middle of a book. What matters to me is how the chapters (and the people/places/events in them) fit together. The storycraft, if you will. Good editing, internal consistency, etc. Once can only determine these things by reading the whole book, or at least most of it. And since I don't have the time to devote to reading bad books in the hope they'll be good, I greatly rely on reviews, including those from Amazon.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoI like this. It presents a snippet from a book, you can choose to read a longer snippet and then choose to get the book name and details.
- stared 13y agoAs a side note, I love the footnote: "3NJ uses cookies to function. For some insane reason EU law requires me to tell you this. By continuing I assume your permission to do so. Complete info on what they're used for is here. This banner will only appear once."
- landhar 13y agoI don't think there's a need for this: "For some insane reason " it doesn't sound very professional.
- noir_lord 13y agoI'm not sure I agree, it really does depend on your target audience, I saw it and it gave me a chuckle (as someone who remembers the flap about cookies a few years ago).
- JeffJenkins 13y agoIt seems like this is going to be heavily biased away from traditionally published books if the authors/publishers have to upload the chapter. I'd actually prefer they were using Amazon to pull in mainstream books.
- owenjones 13y agoI agree; four of the five random picks I made took me to this author's website: http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?page_id=2079 http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?page_id=2079.
- aet 13y agoVery creative, I will give this a try. However, I do think editors/publishers provide value in that they at separate the wheat from the chaff.
- DanBC 13y agoI was thinking about this. I don't know if there's such a thing as "freelance editors" or "freelance typesetters" - but there's a need for these kind of services for self-published authors. Some of the books I've read were okay, but could have been good with an editor and with nicer spell / grammar checking. I don't know how that business could work? Authors sometimes collaborate. Perhaps something like a author's co-op? They could pull in designers / artists for the covers and do cross-promotion too.
- pessimizer 13y agoSounds like a job for a matchmaking Web 2.0 CRUD app. I bet it'd make money.
- bstpierre 13y agoThere are indeed freelance editors -- both at the copyedit level and at a higher level. Self-pubbed authors often hire freelance artists for cover design. And there are freelance book designers for both dead-tree and e-books. There are also services that provide "canned" book design service -- i.e. you pick from a template. To me it seems that the hardest part of the whole equation for an indy author is promotion. There are so many books published daily that it's really hard to get readers for your work.
- cantlin 13y agoI'd like it even more streamlined. Send five anonymized snippets to my inbox every Friday and let me click one button to order one of them to my door. Anyone know a service like this?
- jstanley 13y agoSounds like it wouldn't be too hard for 3NJ to implement if there is demand. Have you contacted them about this? I would also be interested.
- darkxanthos 13y agoI love this idea! I don't read very much fiction because it's hard to find something worth the time investment. This model would enable me to find and buy fiction books I'm interested in.
- dmix 13y agoWe're building a book recommendation service that is delivered via a weekly email: http://bookvibe.com http://bookvibe.com Uses some sophisticated NLP to monitor what books people are talking about.
- jastr 13y agoZinc is an api that could be pretty useful for this. It let's you write code to ship stuff. Pretty slick - https://zinc.io/ https://zinc.io/
- dsr_ 13y agoUI note: when something looks like a button, it needs to be a button. The genre "buttons" are only active right around their text, which means that "SF" has a much smaller active area than "History", even though they present the same visual appearance.
- auggierose 13y agoYep, noticed the same. I guess most readers here on HN will go for the SF genre first :-)
- mathattack 13y agoIt would be great if this works, but there is a lot of noise in the book world. Even with good filtering I find myself putting down a lot of drivel. This said, if it opens up the variety of what we're reading, it can't hurt. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon and friends unduly cut down on the variety of what I see. The browsing ability of bookstores has been lost.
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y agoSecurity risk blocked for your protection Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Potentially Damaging Content. Sites in this category may pose a security threat to network resources or private information, and are blocked by your organization.
- dmix 13y agoI always love when someone posts the false-positives of their companies shitty firewall. It's not the website owners responsibility to be firewall friendly.
- blueblob 13y agoSeeing as the random from the fantasy genre always gives me item 220, I feel as though it is not very random.
- Kuiper 13y agoI think that #220 is currently the only story in the database tagged as "fantasy". Some of the genres (such as 'alt history' and 'western') have no tagged stories. I presume that this is due to the service having just launched--I'm sure that with enough exposure to self-published authors, this service will have a sizable chunk of content to work with by the end of the day.
- dalai 13y agoThey just launched and only have ten submissions.
- platz 13y agoAll the random entries I got were either SF or crime... I think the source list of books may have some bias torwards those genres
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 13y agoI just posted the first chapter of my graphic novel. I'm interested to see how they react to this.