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The Books We Talk About (and Those We Don’t)
- goronbjorn 12y agoMaybe I've read too many Paul Graham essays, but this felt like a book-centric explanation of "Make something people want".
- Ianvdl 12y agoIt rather seems like "Make something people like to argue about", which I guess leads to the same thing in the end.
- theswan 12y agoTangentially - I consistently find myself wanting to discuss a book I've read, but unable to do so for lack of others who're in the same position. Are there places on the internet for good discussion around individual books?
- mtrn 12y agoI am working on such a place on saturdays :)
- recuter 12y agoGoodReads?
- theswan 12y agoHmm, GoodReads seems to be an imdb for books. I'd be more interested in a format more suited toward discussion/annotation - like what you'd get out of a good college-level literature course.
- jasode 12y agoIf the books you want to discuss are still under active copyright (Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, etc) instead of the public domain (e.g. Mark Twain, Shakespeare, etc), how do you envision the shared annotations feature to work? For example, google books doesn't show pages 43-44 (and many other pages are missing) in Blood Meridian: http://books.google.com/books?id=s-QzccStux4C&lpg=PP1&dq=blood%20meridian&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=s-QzccStux4C&lpg=PP1&dq=blo... It seems that to create a website to fulfill your idea, we would need to have a blanket license to not only store 100% of the text digitally on the servers' harddrives but to also display any part of the complete text to all members so they can annotate it. A giant like Google Inc. was not able to get such terms from publishers.
- JetSpiegel 12y agoJust store the annotations and let the members provide the books.
- jasode 12y agoWhat do those stored annotations point to if members are providing the books? This isn't RapGenius where all of the lyrics and annotations are shown on the same screen. If the data structure of the stored annotations includes "pointers" to a specific book, what does it "point" to? A page number? Many epub/mobi books don't have absolute page numbers. For dead tree books, even the page numbers can change between the printing of the 1st hardback cover to the 2nd paperback edition. When I think of "shared annotations", I'm thinking of virtual comments written in the margins of a book that anyone else can see. How would members "provide" books for that scenario? Upload epub & mobi files? I guess it would be easier to quote (copy&paste) a particular passage a book and then follow up with some commentary but that type of thing can already be done today in any book discussion forum. To me, that's just quoting/citing and not annotating.
- philh 12y agoThis could presumably be handled similar to how patch does it. When you make an annotation, you store an approximate location and say a hundred words of context. When someone loads your annotation, even if they have a slightly different edition, you can look for almost-the-same text, searching outwards from an appropriate point.
- msluyter 12y agoPossibly http://www.goodreads.com http://www.goodreads.com.
- jonathanwallace 12y agoThere's subreddits such as http://www.reddit.com/r/books http://www.reddit.com/r/books and specific subreddits for genres such as http://www.reddit.com/r/SF_Book_Club/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SF_Book_Club/ amongst others. You may also find discussions on reviews on http://www.goodreads.com/ http://www.goodreads.com/.
- bobcostas55 12y ago/r/books with its 3 million subscribers is really, really bad. /r/literature is much smaller and therefore better. Way more interesting content, but still extremely entry-level though. And plagued with stereotypical redditisms (one of the top posts right now is Tao Lin translated to Latin).
- Apocryphon 12y agoI'd be interested to know what the public consensus on Tao Lin is.
- redacted 12y agoTry looking for small genre-specific subreddits, like /r/printSF for science fiction books etc. More focused and insightful discussion seems strongly inversely correlated with subreddit size.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThis is also an issue for me. The answer is a book group if you can find like minded individuals, or people willing to read. Too many people just don't read anything any more so the possibility of just 'running into someone at a party' who does read has been greatly reduced. It might make for an interesting meetup at a maker space I suspect.
- m52go 12y agoWould you pay for this? Like a couple of bucks per discussion or something? I've thought about the same thing before but can't figure out how economics would work. Everyone expects things to be free free free nowadays. I think it could grow into something really cool where you could have authors & other respected thought-leaders participate and have very deep, insightful conversations.
- judk 12y agoAmazon ads can fund it.
- bennesvig 12y agoAnd authors would be willing to pay for banner ads or sponsored recommendations on the site.
- zem 12y agoi think, psychologically, i wouldn't value something i had to pay for. i'd feel more like a "consumer" than a participant. (and from an economic standpoint, the users would be generating a lot of the value but capturing none of it)
- m52go 12y agoHow does paying for a service hinder you from capturing its value? Do you not value your house or car because you have to pay for it?
- zem 12y agoit's just a psychological thing. i'm sure different people have different psychologies around it. (and yes, i'd probably value my house more if i were not paying rent on it) as for capturing value, i'm referring specifically to the monetary aspect of things - assuming the company adds value by providing the platform and gets paid for it and the users add value by providing the content but do not get paid for it, the explicit introduction of money into the ecosystem has introduced a situation where one party is seen to be asymmetrically rewarded for the overall success of the ecosystem.
- tokenadult 12y agoI've curated my list of Facebook friends to be something like that. The list of real-life friends who make up a core part of my list of Facebook friends includes a lot of people from a membership organization gifted children, whose parents then form a mutual support network. This, to be sure, is a hard strategy to replicate exactly, but over time I think that your professional or other affinity groupings will help you find people who like to discuss books you like thoughtfully. I get good book recommendations here on HN all the time, most recently a set of books about German history,[1] but we hardly ever have extended book discussions here. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693 http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143037900/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143037900/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711/
- meej 12y agoperhaps librarything? https://www.librarything.com/talk https://www.librarything.com/talk https://www.librarything.com/groups https://www.librarything.com/groups
- skybrian 12y agoMore generally we could come up with other kinds of conversation starters: Games: Minecraft Products: anything from Apple, new Windows releases Among programmers, programming languages are a pretty reliable topic.
- graycat 12y agoSo the title starts "The books ...", and reading the article shows that by books they mean just fictional novels. but, the books we talk about on HN have included: Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming. Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein, Introduction to Algorithms. Jeffrey D. Ullman, Principles of Database Systems. Jacques Neveu, Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability. David G. Luenberger, Optimization by Vector Space Methods. Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language. Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, Algorithms. Sorry, NYR, my house, nearly every room, is awash in books in mathematics, science, engineering, music, none of which would be of interest to the NYR, and a few others but likely less than 2% are fictional novels. So, the claim of the title "the books we talk about" appears not to apply very well to HN and the same or much less so to me. That is, the title is presumptive. Why do I say this? Maybe not everyone at HN will agree with me, but in grades 1-12 and the first two years of college, I felt force fed like a Strasbourg goose with books that were fiction. It wasn't until the last two years of college that I got to concentrate on what I really cared about, non-fiction, that is, science, mathematics, engineering, etc. So I remain torqued: For years and years I was force fed with I didn't want and largely blocked from what I did want. And, now that I have more understanding of fiction, I have to conclude, with this force feeding and blocking, some of my best years for learning were seriously wasted. Thus, I'm torqued. I have to be reminded of C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and find, (with irony) with that favorite word of the literary set, irony, a post in the culture of engineering, math, and science by the culture of fictional novels, belle lettre, literary art, etc.
- modfodder 12y agoSeems like your best years of learning were seriously wasted at least partially because you either refused or seemed incapable of learning from the books you were forced to read. Its great that you have a love of learning from nonfiction, I wish more people had the desire you do, but there is a lot to learn from fiction if you are open to it.
- graycat 12y agoThe books they forced me to read, just what the heck were the intended lessons? Tough to say. Since then I saw that I should have just gotten the CliffsNotes; they make it clear and explicit just what the heck the really big lessons are supposed to be. The books and teachers didn't. > but there is a lot to learn from fiction if you are open to it. Being "open to it" is not nearly enough. Knowing about people is important, darned important, and I knew that in quite clear terms in the fifth grade and since. A big problem is, the works of fictional literature just do not make clear just what their points are or give solid support for their points. Instead, it's all just a definite maybe. For any intended lessons, the works of fictional literature just are not solid enough to take seriously, and there are now much better sources, ones that make clear just what they are claiming and provide relatively solid support for their claims.
- fakeanon 12y agoNSFW.
- prevailrob 12y agoI for one would like to see IRC based book clubs flourish. Real time conversation without being limited to 140 characters
- zem 12y agoone of the most interesting points, though the writer didn't spend much time on it, was how the serialised nature of some of the famous older novels meant everyone was much more likely to be reading them at the same time, and how serialised television fiction plays the same role today. i'd add to that novel series like harry potter - it wasn't just that the first book was wildly popular, but that as the series progressed it swept up more and more fans who were waiting together for the next book. standalone novels don't have that sort of forcing function, and it doesn't seem to work for multiple books by the same author (e.g. no one talked about dan brown's novels after 'the da vinci code')
- officemonkey 12y agoTwo thoughts: 1. Certain standalone authors had that strength. Stephen King certainly did in the 80s-90s. 2. I think this is why certain fiction series tend to have very strong followings. Regardless of the HBO Series, people were hungry for "Dance with Dragons" when it came out. The internet certainly helps with TV series. Much of the popularity of "LOST" was the skillful manipulation of that popularity by the production. Compare "LOST" with "Heroes" (poor quality rapidly squandered popularity) and "Firefly" (utter failure to leverage the growing fandom.)
- zem 12y agoi think the first time i experienced it was with robert jordan's "wheel of time" novels. before that, my friends and i used to wait eagerly for each new discworld book, but that was mostly a matter of "yay, new pratchett". with wheel of time, we were suddenly waiting to see what happened next, which is a very different feeling.
- goldfeld 12y agoAlso, related to series you have a few film directors who command some of that strength. Tarantino comes to mind, though it's an interesting example because there's a sort of common universe underlying the movies. However as you go more niche/cult you'll probably find small communities who wait dearly on the author's next work, be it a film or a book.
- gbog 12y agoA side effect of using books to explore the shared ground between people is that it needs to start with some name dropping, which I have felt is really disliked by Americans in general. As a French, I see name dropping as a quick way to find which books can be talked about with some people you don't know well, but it is perceived as snobbish and may trigger some inferiority complex. Not sure why: it is ok to not read books, it is ok to not have read Proust or Celine, it is ok to be very picky. Having different tastes and cultural background is what makes discussion interesting (but it helps if some common ground can be found).