BookAuthority

The Most Recommended Nonfiction Books.

39 followers

The Most Recommended Nonfiction Books.

39 followers

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Business intelligence software

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Books

BookAuthority collects the most recommended books on business, technology and science - as featured on CNN, Inc and Forbes

Launch tags:Web App•Productivity•History Books

Launch Team

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Maker

Hey Product Hunt! Over the past six months, we have collected thousands of book recommendations from renowned industry leaders. People like Bezos, Zuckerberg and Gates; Thiel, Andreessen and Altman; Seth Godin, Andrew Chen and Gary V; Marty Cagan, Laura Klein, Jakob Nielsen and 100+ others. Today we’re excited to launch BookAuthority - a service that helps you discover the very best business books, based on those experts’ recommendations. BookAuthority allows you to select from a dozen areas of interest such as startups, design, product, marketing, productivity or leadership. It then produces a personalized reading-list tailored just for you. You can recommend books yourself, mark books that you want to read, and track books you’ve already read. We hope you’ll like it as much as we do! I would love to hear your feedback and answer your questions.

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8yr ago

@liorgrossman awesome tool!

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8yr ago

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Maker

@aj_segal Thank you Avishay! Glad to hear you enjoy it

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8yr ago

@liorgrossman How does it work? Why does it need my fb login? It is personalized because it extracts info from my fb or selecting an interest area, if the later can it really be called personalized?

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8yr ago

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Maker

@bluemonk482 Hi Bo. We use Facebook Connect as a means to sign up to the service, so users can quickly build a profile and save their preferences, get book recommendations, recommend books, and save books for later reading. Facebook Connect saves users a lot of hassle, since in 2 clicks (no typing whatsoever) you get a profile, with your name, title and photo, and you're able to log in later any time and from any device. That's an important part of user experience in my humble opinion. We also use Facebook to determine which books you've read in the past, and which books you have recommended, and our algorithm adapts the recommendations accordantly.

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8yr ago

@liorgrossman Nice! Sounds good!

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8yr ago

Chatway

There's a big need for your platform. Great job there! Are you planning to add an inner rating system?

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8yr ago

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Maker

@galdubinski Thank you Gal. There's already an inner rating system for BookAuthority, but it's very subtle at the moment. As a user, you can click "Recommend" next to any books (that's probably the equivalent of the like button), and it will impact the book's rating. Not as much as a recommendation by Bill Gates, but be sure that it does impact the rating. In addition, once you click recommend, a small panel shows up, than enabled you to rate the book (1-5 stars) and write down a one-line review of the book (we prefer to keep the reviews short and concise). Hope this answers your question.

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8yr ago

Chatway

@liorgrossman sweet! :)

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8yr ago

This is a reader's dream. Very cool. Is sign up only through Facebook though? Sorry if this question has already been asked!

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8yr ago

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Maker

@renee_sandefur Wow, thank you for the kind words Renee! Yes, at the moment sign up is only available through Facebook.

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8yr ago

Wow, cool product. Bookmarked. Are these "real" recommendations? I mean was this scraped from some inc.com article "5 books that Jeff bezos wants you to read?" or did you contact each individual? If you contacted everyone, what was your approach? Really curious...

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8yr ago

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Maker

@jrmarciniak Thank you very much! That's a great question, and the answer is - both! (about 50/50%) :) Early on, the first profiles were created by doing extensive web research, where we searched social media, blogs, podcasts and other public resources (yeah, Inc. too...) for book recommendations by industry leaders. Lately, almost all recommendations were collected by approaching industry leaders directly and asking them to submit their book recommendations. We do it by finding their email, which is often very difficult, and asking them personally to open a profile or submit their book recommendations. As of now, about half of our authority profiles were created by research (people like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) and half were creating by contacting the authorities directly and getting their recommendations (e.g. Ken Blanchard, Nir Eyal and Sam Hurley)

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8yr ago

Meetaverse

Very very impressive platform and launch. Always looking for new books to read myself. Gotta keep myself busy on Shabbat. I'll be using this regularly. What's the strategy as far as mobile is concerned? Any app plans?

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8yr ago

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Maker

@hilzfuld Thank you Hillel, glad you find it useful! Please keep the feedback coming, I'm interested of hearing how well BookAuthority when used on a regular basis. We definitely see a mobile app in BookAuthority's future, possibly a hybrid (half-native half-webview) app that is based on the React Native technology. This means we would launch it closely for both iPhone and Android, since it would be developed in a cross-platform manner. We've already built BookAuthority's website in a very mobile-friendly way to help facilitate that. This will take some time, though. We want to take the time to learn how people use BookAuthority on mobile and web, and obviously the design and development process will take some time. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you think your BookAuthority usage on the web vs. mobile would be different, if at all.

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8yr ago

Wow! This is great. I have some questions though! - How do you rank the books under recommendation? Would that have the same ranking for all the users based on what category they chose? Or would that differ depending on the user's FB profile? - Do you have any long term plan especially about making this a serious profitable business? If yes, what are the monetization channels you are thinking of? ( I assume that you have affiliate links as of now. Correct me if I am wrong) Good luck!

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8yr ago

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Maker

@pravilz Thank you very much! 1. The books are ranked by Authority Rating. The Authority Rating is calculated based on industry leaders’ recommendations, user reviews, sales figures and additional factors such as how old the book is. The Authority rating is absolute for all users and for all pages (e.g. if a book has a rating of 4.73, it will be the same rating for all users and in all pages). In "Recommended for You", we choose which books to display based on the topics you've chosen, making sure to remove any books you've already read. 2. Correct, the business model is Amazon affiliate links, we get commissions for purchases made through Amazon links. Frankly we haven't thought of any other business model. We want to see BookAuthority grow first, then figure out how well the affiliate model works and how much revenue does it yield. If that doesn't work out, we'll have to be creative about the business model.

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8yr ago

Beat

Like everything about it, this is one of the websites that never go out from bookmarks. Are you planning to add some short testimonials from people who recommend book?

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8yr ago

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Maker

@levchenkod Thanks Dmitriy! Yes, we do plan to add short reviews by people who recommended books. Try and click the "Recommend" button, you'll see a box that allows you to optionally write a short review about the book. Once we'll have enough book reviews, we'll start to display them alongside the recommendations.

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8yr ago

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