Hey everyone ✌️
Excited to launch a side project I've been working on.
📚Good Books is a curated collection of book recommendations from some of the most successful, influential and interesting people around the world.
Let me know who you'd love book recommendations from in the comments and I'll add them to the list👇
This project started about 6-months ago when I started to keep track of all the books that I wanted to read and who recommended them. I then got (a little) obsessed with the project and ended up accumulating over 15,000 book recommendations from about 1,250 people...
I built Good Books to share these book recommendations with the world, organising them into simple categories and industries so it's easy to find your next read.
What's next for Good Books?
📚 100s more recommendations every month
🙋♀️ Adding more interesting people (who would you like to see?)
📝 Writing some curated recommendation lists
📩 Planning a weekly newsletter with recommendations
🕵️♂️ Adding sources to book recommendations
Follow me on Twitter or Dribbble for more updates and ask me anything! 🙃
Jordan
@haydenbleasel Thanks man – I've been meaning to add your books!
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@jordan__hughes Hi Jordan, first of all kudos for your hustle, and your product looks amazing.
I am documenting journey of makers, creators, entrepreneurs through out the world. The goal is to do a short interview, capture it in video, and let it out to the world, so that others can get inspiration. And also to get an acknowledgement, for you, and for your hustle. I would like to request you to email me, so that we can schedule some time, at tellmeaboutit510@gmail.com .
Thanks, and good luck!
Subodh
I often choose interesting books from various tops, but most of all I like fantasy about superheroes and detective stories. I also find popular science literature and books on business topics useful. But in order to read them, I need to have free time, the opportunity to concentrate and delve into reading. While books like the Cradle Series relax me. I think many people have the feeling that they want to choose a book to suit their mood. Therefore, I hope there are books on various topics in your collection so that everyone can find something interesting for themselves.
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Great job but is there maybe a way to promote indie bookshops through this project instead of Amazon? Maybe using https://bookshop.org or something else? I feel like in 2020 during COVID-19 promoting even indirectly a company like Amazon is bad karma...
@zellersamuel1 100% agree. Thanks for the feedback! It's on the roadmap and will probably end up being a mix of both at this point
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@jordan__hughes Superb! You get my upvote. I have a book published since 2018 by an indie publisher that is selling very well, unfortunately the publisher is not getting much from Amazon sales. A few more % of sales towards indie bookshops and publishers can really make a difference. All the best for your project!
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@zellersamuel1 +1 on this. We need to support small business owners now more than ever.
I'm curious if you're thinking about ways to help automate things so this can continue to grow and scale with less manual creation/input.
Perhaps opening it up to a broader community of contributors, taking user-generated submissions? How're you tracking submissions? Spreadsheet? Sorting through email?
Impressive project on all fronts, and to see it's all made on Webflow (/cc @callmevlad@bryantchou), to boot! Great work @jordan_hughes1
@callmevlad@bryantchou@jordan_hughes1@scottmathson Automating this further would be the dream! I've added a submission form to the site which is a baby step towards that.
At the moment, I've just hacked together a mega Airtable which batch imports 90% of the manual work straight into Webflow's CMS.
I'd like to explore taking this a step further and automate changes using Zapier or similar... I haven't had any experience with this before.
On the community front – that could be the next evolution! I'm exploring what's possible with MemberStack to see what's possible with nocode solutions at the moment.
Really appreciate the feedback! 🤗
@jordan_hughes1 solid setup - great you’re making use of these tools for quick MVPs, further validation, and iterate and rework later.
Let me know if you want any insights on custom development/code approach - happy to help and answer q’s.
Solid launch day, congrats!
@jordan_hughes1 and for what it’s worth: I see a big opportunity beyond the affiliate model, too.
You’ve consolidated hours upon hours of podcast interview book recommendations and other sources into a dataset here that I know other publishers and creators could and would love to utilize! Very marketable API here!
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Beautiful design, super clean ❤️🔥
I was wondering..
- why is the screen split on the homepage?
- is there a way create an account and to track what I will be reading?
@om_13_e thank you! The split screen is purely for #design 😅, I wanted to do something a little different to the standard landing page.
Account creation is a great idea! That's the long-term goal 😊
I love those kinds of things, but if I can hazard a slightly negative comment, as a big reader, I've seen those books recommended maybe.. a million times before? There's not much value in the curation if you're curating from a very narrow segment of "successful" people (who for the most part probably didn't get successful because they read books).
Also, I think you're approaching the problem the wrong way. I don't want MORE recommendations, I already have too many of them. I'm not sure anyone can read 6500 books in a lifetime. I want FEWER, more relevant recommendations.
P.S. Not picking on you in particular, could have said the same thing about the other book curation products in PH. Hope the feedback's constructive enough, and happy to provide more if you want to dig into it. I think there's a lot of untapped potential in that domain.
@davidoudiette Hey David, thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree that we could all do with less of the same book recommendations (I've lost track of how many times people have asked me if I've read Sapiens).
Even though I'm adding a diverse mix of people, there's always going to be a bunch of books that people recommend time and again. For those who aren't as well-read as you, they may find this valuable and may have never heard of many of the books in the top 100.
For those who have checked out all the classics, I've added "curated" top lists to keep things interesting. The intention with these lists is to recommended books that people may not have heard of before and aren't as widely recommended. My most recent list on design books features mostly books with only 1-2 recommendations on the site, sometimes none: https://www.goodbooks.io/blog/es...
@jordan__hughes Hey there Jordan! Yeah, guess I'm getting a little annoyed at the never ending list of reading recommendations with Sapiens / Thinking Fast and Slow / etc. I've read them. They're decent books. Not sure either of them will stand the test of time. They have all the ingredients of flash-in-the-pan literature.
What you're converging toward here is also what I found lately to be the best source of recommendations: something like Fivebooks.com. Someone who's a specialist about a given topic lists their 5 (not 10, 20, 500) top books in that domain. That's highly specialized and curated information. I think that's the right direction to go in. Fewer books, longer explanations about *why* they're the right one (i.e. what do people who are the best in that domain look for, what constitutes a good book), and also explaining why other books you might consider have *not* been included.
That's a much deeper and more efficient way to orient yourself when trying to pick books.
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Good Books looks and feels fantastic. Just form the outset and exploring the content it feels refreshing when compared to something like Goodreads.
Having said that, I'd be interested to hear how you see yourself positioning against such an engrained player as Goodreads with the backing of Amazon?
@fred_urquhart Hey Fred! Thanks for the kind words 🤗
I don't see myself positioning against Goodreads any time soon to be 100% transparent! I think it's a monster of a platform and I use it daily. At least for now, I'd like to think of goodbooks.io as a more curated approach where I can feature recommendations from both the usual suspects, as well as lesser-known people in their fields.
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