Hey ?makers! It would be great if you guys used Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/) instead of Amazon links to help support independent bookstores (especially during these times). Love the design of the website!!
@thesameerk 100% agree. Thanks for the feedback! It's on the roadmap to add Goodreads links and other site and will probably end up being a mix of both at this point
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The site is beautiful and the experience of using it is nice, no doubt. Hats off to the designer(s).
My critique is of the concept: what is the value of curating book recommendations from people whose influence is already outsized in our society? The resulting recommendations are biased towards "successful" (i.e. materially wealthy) people. I believe that reading is about expanding perspective, and in its current state this product promotes a rather specific worldview.
For example, two of the top four fiction book recommendations are Ayn Rand novels. Ayn Rand's influence on early Silicon Valley is notorious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al.... Regardless of what you think of Ayn Rand's work, the idea that one ought to read two of her novels before all other fiction ever written, speaks volumes about the perspectives being represented in this product.
I would expand and work on making the recommendations inclusive of a broader range of perspectives, because the site design itself is quite lovely.
@jffng Thanks for the feedback, Jeff. Working on adding more diversified people. Unfortunately, there's always going to be a high correlation of people who recommend the same books, no matter where you sample from. 🙂
No one ever marked it down, but that doesn't stop a few of us from mourning it. Stunning site - experience is on another level to what I'm used to with GoodReads!
Excellent idea and beautiful design. I have a couple of suggestion I'd love to see them implemented in your product, though:
- I like the simplicity of the book page: a medium-sized cover, a brief description, and a list of famous people who recommend the book. This is great for most people, but not everyone. I'd like to see more information about the book: average rating (aggregated from multiple sources), popularity score (number of reviewers relative to the publication date), number of pages (most people tend to pick shorter books), and the publication date. Don't make them visible by default; this would negatively affect your simple design that fits the majority, I guess.
- Adding a sorting option will probably make the experience even better; sort by publication date, popularity, average rating.. etc.
- I'd love to see a hyperlink to Goodreads where I can read some reviews.
@mhadidg These are awesome suggestions, thanks Mustapha! I'm chipping away at adding the Goodreads links – I hadn't considered pulling in the scores/page count as well 🙂
Thanks for the feedback!
Loved the design of your website. Reminds me of read-next.com by @dhvanilp. I wanted to ask how did you collect these recommendations but I guess you're going to add sources in the next update.
@dhvanilp@weirdowizard Thanks Darshan – big fan of productdisrupt.com also! I tried to automate/script as much as I could but there's still a LOT of manual work, unfortunately. Usually I follow a process of a) search for obvious interviews/recommendations that they've made publicly; b) search through their twitter feed; c) reach out to them directly (if I think they may respond).
Two interesting insights – of the thousands of books on the site, the top recommended books only have 20-30 recommendations so there wasn't as much correlation as I expected! And only about 30-40% of the people I reached out to responded to be included in the project and get a backlink which I didn't understand...
@dhvanilp@jordan__hughes Thank you for your kind words. I understand, not everybody is going to respond. But I like how you've approached it, keep up with it. I'm definitely going to share this in the Product Disrupt Newsletter.
Hey :) This really looks very well done. One thing that isn't yet clear to me is where you get the rights for using the covers from? Maybe this is something that you can explain to me, as I'm really interested in a solution for that.
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I love this @jordan_hughes1 ! My only concern here for you is the image copyrights.
Did you get permission for each of the 'successful people' to use their images? That could be a legal unless you're using royalty-free images that allow non-editorial?
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