I am trying to create an online experience that is like wandering through your local bookstore. Along with little notes pointing out great books by people who really know that topic. For the beta launch, I’ve got a little over 400 book recommendation lists by authors on specific subjects. These are all hand curated.
This is just the start and I have a lot of improvements coming. I will be adding related book lists so that you can keep following your curiosity from list to list.
I know the homepage is a bit shitty. I will add actual topic support and topic pages this summer (and an improved card format coming soon for the listings on the bottom).
I am hoping to get into NLP later this year to help me with topics around the books and book lists.
Feel free to ask me anything!
My email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to say hi or share some thoughts,
Thanks, Ben
I'm excited to see this. I've started to become really convinced lately that online shopping (for everything!) really needs a next leap forward.
I'm sick of everything I can buy on the internet being presented as a grid of images with a title, description, and price, with a detail page if I click on it.
The presentation of a physical stores is so varied! A small bookstore is so different from a large bookstore, which is so different from a toy-store, which is again so different from an auto-parts store.
I think the online UX for shopping is in dire need of iteration at this point. There's a reason each of those physical stores are presented differently, and I feel like we've lost so much of that in online shopping.
I'm really excited to see the ideas you come up with for ways to make buying books online different from buying shoes or auto-parts online. I hope you're able to find some of that magic that bookstores were able to create.
I might have missed it, but it doesn’t seem to have any books about Christianity. Lots of other religions, though. How can that be? Was it a conscious decision?
It is just how topics timed out :), I did a big focus on Buddhism, meditation, and stoicism in the first couple of months. So they are over represented right now. I've redesigned how I do topics now so that they flow in more evenly, but there is a lag and that will take 3 to 4 months to start shaking out.
Fivebooks.com is similar in some aspects, their interviews with experts I find very enlightening. By now they do have lists on very wide variety of topics including eclectic ones.
Eg: they have lists on books about Indonesia, about biographies of Charlemagne, about understanding Modern Greece, etc.
And, a great pitch about how this is a win/win, they get to feature their book alongside the list forever (plus switch it out when they have a new book coming out). And, they get to share their voice and expertise.
Yep happy too, can you email me at ben@shepherd.com? I should note I personally customize them based on the author's book and genre, so that adds a lot of magic to this. Especially if I have read their book and can talk about it.
Thanks, about 15% of the links to bookshop.org goes to a 404 page as they don't stock used books and don't have all the books Amazon does. We are working with them to find a way to make our system smarter, as right now they block our server from even checking their site for a 404.
Right now my interest is on Watchmaking, Electronics, and Machining.
The books I like are are usually old, and only found while browsing used bookstores in person. Books with no isbn's. Books that are rare. Books I didn't knew existed. Manuals I didn't know about.
My idea is having the owners of used book stores take pictures of the books they have on shelves(Just the spines. They would need to walk down the isles, and take clear pictures of each wall of books. They would send the pictures to me, and I would somehow stitch the pics into an app.
I have taken pictures of my books on my shelfs, and even with an old iphone, I can zoom into read titles on books.
The end result would be a website where the customer could digitally walk down book store isles (navigation like google maps?) , and order books they might fancy. Think of the way we look at digital paintings in museums?
The owner would get 95% of each sale, or more? Or, all of the money, if the entity was set up as a 501c3 to benefit used book stores.
Imagine all those old books out there, and walking down an isle on books in Ohio, or Ireland, and ordering a book you see on the shelf?
On a certain level, I hope an app like this is never built by anyone. The internet has ruined so many things I liked. Finding an obscure book, at a reasonable price, in a musty book store is an experience I enjoy.
(I'm suprised Google hasen't attempted it already. They could probally do it very well in a virtual reality setting? Oh yea, I like the app this guy did.)
There are various examples of people creating storefronts in applications like Minecraft and Roblox. I think it's just a matter of time before we see a better 3D World constructed in webassembly to represent millions of stores across the world. That marketplace will be huuge!
That’s a great idea! My sister-in-law owns an independent bookstore. I suspect the idea could get some traction.
However, you’d probably need more than spines. One of the things about being in a store, is the ability to pull the book out, and look into it; maybe even ask questions of the staff.
My idea is a bit different. We might be able to get our own patent? Maybe? If anyone wants to pay for the patent, I'd be willing to split any future revenue 50/50. Could you take the idea, and do it yourself--yes. I do need something in my life I put energy into though yes! You might be helping out a disenfranchised/poor developer? I reside in the Bay Area.
My email is dandunphy@comcast.net
(On another note, I have felt for awhile Patents, and Trademarks, should be tied to income, and number of patents applied for. A poor person, like myself, pays just as much as Google for a patent. Crazy? I would like to see patent fees on a graduated scale. Companies that spit out patents daily would be charged much more for every patent. For instance, Google's first patent would be $1000. After 10 the price is 1 million per patent. After 20 the price per patent is 100 million.)
That would be extremely cool for many niche interests and hobbies.
I think it would be a lot of work for book store owners however because along with taking pictures they would also need to fill in some metadata as well about the book to make any kind of searching/categorizing possible. Maybe an intrepid entrepreneur could start with a few bookstores and do that categorization for them as a "do things that don't scale" experiment.
I like the idea, I love to wander on old bookstores as well. But that's the magic, isn't? Walk there, be there, listen the sounds, see tourists as well, see the owner (often an old person with his own "methods"), the smell, the closed spaces. I like the idea but the feeling won't be the same at all if I can navigate it from the couch.
My main pet peeve while browsing in person is the constant turning of my head (sideways) from left to right, because titles on book spines aren't always facing the same direction. Google could fix that.
I like the idea, and the execution, but not sure what it has to do with my local bookstores. Perhaps the next evolution of bookstores (particularly since this is linking to Amazon)?
One suggestion: for topics that have one or more "sides" to them or that are controversial, considering cross-linking to a list that captures the other side, or skepticism, or critique, or more reading. For example, "Snipers In The Vietnam War" might link to "The Vietnam War Era." Emphatically not talking about politics here.
Yep, this is a starting point and I am working toward the goal of building an experience that is like wandering through a bookstore :). I will never replace local bookstores and my hope is to help them get more business. I've been talking with authors about ideas there too and as this project gets further along I am hoping to extend the recommendations I am collecting for them to use in their stores along with the materials. Plus I am hoping to figure out ways to get them foot traffic.
Great idea!
How would you identify the other side / challenges to that book list?
This is something I am thinking about a lot as I want to combat social media who serves up the same worldview to people without challenging it. Here is a preview screenshot of the related book list feature I plan to add to every list next month too:
https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists
Please let me know what you think and if you want to take this to email I am at ben@shepherd.com.
I am increasingly finding it difficult to read books. It feels like it takes ages to read - like reading 20 pages feels like an hour gone by, but it was only 10 minutes. That adds anxiety, as if I am missing out on other things while I read.
To keep up, I got the app Blinkist. I listened to dozens of excerpts from topics that interest me, but now I can't do that as I found that most books follow the same patterns and it is all the same. What to do?
> That adds anxiety, as if I am missing out on other things while I read.
I'd wager this right there is the problem.
Sounds like you're reading through books like they are a chore. Instead, find one book with a subject/theme that interests you (so the subject itself is not boring) and then try to relax and read slowly.
If it's fiction, savor every word and phrase, try to visualise the description/emotion/action. If it's non-fiction, think through what what you just read means, why is that's so (it's okay to not have answers, questions are important).
I know "try to relax" is unhelpful. But one approach I'd try is to carve out a block of time (say, 1hr), put your phone/devices on Do Not Disturb, set an alarm for one hour (so you don't think too much time's slipping away) and just read.
It's purely anecdotal, but both me and a couple of friends commented on how consuming short content (eg. youtube videos, short blog posts) led to "attention atrophy". If the content doesn't "get to the point" immediately, we get anxious and bored.
If this describes you as well, try consuming less short-form and more long-form content (longer videos, longer in-depth articles, etc).
That is probably true. Now if something is longer than 5 minutes I don't watch it end to end, but keep skipping "to the point". When I listen to lectures, I am always listening at fastest speed possible and also skip.
I tried meditation as well, but I have this feeling of doom crawling around my thoughts when I meditate. Like I am sitting here meditating, and worry that work is not being done.
I need to get to the bottom of this.
This sounds a lot like ADHD, especially in terms of the focus on getting 'to the point' (which can be maladaptive if it results in routinely skipping over the 'filler', which is very often crucial to developing deep understanding).
I need to read more about this. I thought you can't develop ADHD in adulthood. I suffer from chronic pain and when the symptoms were worse I had to constantly do something to take my attention away from pain. Now I am getting quite good medication so I don't have to do that often. But I was definitely able to watch even very long lectures and I read many books when I was younger without problem. Brain is such a fascinating device :-)
Ive come to enjoy audiobooks as an alternative for the same reasons. Somehow just listening instead of reading makes the same texts feel a lot more enjoyable to me.
The great thing about audiobooks is that you can do physical things at the same time (gardening, running, cooking, gym, etc). Using audiobooks has increased by book consumption by about 5x.
I'm skeptical of the retention of information when it comes to audio books because of this very reason. Do you find you have the same sort of recall when it comes to dicsussing what you've read with audio books?
It's different. I think if you are interested in the subject, then you retain it. Also because you can do other things at the same time, you can listen to say three different books on one subject rather than read one book on that subject - that way you get differing viewpoints, which also aid retention.
When I first started listening to audiobooks I did find that my mind would wander, but I've discovered that if I play the audiobooks at a slightly faster speed, I have to pay attention more and so my mind doesn't wander so easily.
That has been my problem with both podcasts and audiobooks. I can't multitask and have the content be much more than white noise.
The first audiobooks I tried listening to were books I had already read myself. Just to see how it would be if someone else narrated them. Despite having a feel for what the story was already. I'd lose track of it constantly. Akin to reading the same line over and over when tired.
Which is arguably harder to rewind in audio form than in text.
Watching shortish videos on youtube or some livestream is fine for background noise. But to retain much from what was originally a 300 page novel or whatever. Having large parts of just be remembered as static feels really bad.
Personally I like either fiction books or historical/biographies-kind. Books that try to teach me something often do feel like a chore. (e.g.: i'm trying to read GEB after all the recommendations, but I just can't get into it)
Ya, I've hit moments like that. For me, I look for a purely fun book that is just about escaping and enjoying a story. No pressure to learn or to think just escape. That is usually fantasy or a good space science fiction book.
> but now I can't do that as I found that most books follow the same patterns and it is all the same.
Most self-help books do; not most books. I’m using that term in a broad sense to encompass books which explore one major “life-changing”/“perspective-shifting” idea, like any by Cal Newport or Simon Sinek.
Those books have little substance. They’re pamphlets padded by examples supporting the one thesis. Find an online talk by the author and you’ll get 90% of the juice without spending a penny and by a fraction of the time investment of the book.
I don't know if this helps, but I had a similar problem getting through even one page in a good book. My mind would wander somewhere else mid page and when I realized it, I'd feel silly and have to rewind and rebuild context to continue reading. Usually felt a little ashamed to reread part of the page I had scanned the words of but didn't actually read with my thinking brain.
Eventually what I realized was that these books were actually stimulating my thoughts at a higher frequency than the author intended. This is only really a bad thing if you need to get through the book under a certain deadline. Stimulating new thoughts is precisely why I read books in the first place!
These days, when some sentence sends me on a mental rabbit trail and then consciously pause and follow it as far as I like before returning to the text. Overall this is a much more satisfying reading experience for me.
For me, the most enjoyable part of reading is adding my own thoughts to the experience. It might be vivid imagery as part of reading a sci-fi, or musings on life and truth in a non-fiction. If you frame reading as achieving a predefined goal ("learn topic X"), it's easy to forget this part and become obsessed on speed, with the focus on "consumption" instead of "co-creation". Try setting aside 2 hours where you can either be bored or read. I typically start by relaxing. Sometimes I just relax the entire two hours and dont read at all. When I feel I'm ready, I start reading. Use a watch that measures heart rate variability if you need some extra bio-feedback to get that tension out of your body. When relaxed, your mind will do the rest.
This reminds me of how Roland Barthes would categorize prose as either "readerly" or "writerly", whereas a readerly work is a straightforward and passive experience for the reader, a writerly work is a sort of framework for the reader to participate in the writing, and co-create as you put it.
Recognizing that a work is writerly isn't always obvious. It's often obscured by the fact that reading it can be so stimulating and enjoyable.
I feel more or less the same way. But forcing myself to stick to one or two books at a time helped me. Eventually you will catch the fun in it.
I also find audiobooks to be my favorite format for consuming books, as I can do it at any place and listen at my desired speed.
I read physical and ebooks a lot but I also listen to an Audiobook on my walk each day, I'd recommend trying it out if you feel the to read something. The only value I found in summary services is using them to decide if I'll read the full book. I feel the missing context and stories don't anchor the summaries as well in my mind as when I read a full book, the experience is almost devoid of the joy of reading and feels like an exercise in trivia assimilation.
Well that's not what I was hoping for. I want to see bookshelves - like in the physical store. I want to go to a section (sci-fi, fantasy, cooking, whatever) and browse the bookshelf, with a rendered cover.
Then, I want to click on that cover and read the back of the book, on the book jacket. A sample of a page or two would be nice, but for me it's unnecessary. Finally, buttons to purchase the treepub, epub, audiobook, etc. are all fine - keep that experience digital.
I keep visiting physical bookstores for this reason. Book discovery online is nowhere near as fun, as it was in a physical store.
Given the submitted title said "like wandering a bookstore", the actual site didn't meet my expectations at all :(
What you are describing sounds pretty cool though. I'd only add 2 things:
First, for non-fiction books, an inside preview is a must for me (e.g. for recipe books).
Second, I want the same kind of quantity of books you'd find in a book shop - one of the things that makes it hard to find books on the likes of Amazon is just how many there are. A curated library of books would be preferable.
> Second, I want the same kind of quantity of books you'd find in a book shop
Boutique book shop with airy rooms and lots of places to meet with authors and hold readings, or used book shops with books piled on books and all larger spaces subdivided into warrens and alleys using bookshelves which are, quite often, double-stacked? The former is more manageable, sure, but you'll only find that one philosophy book with interesting marginalia in the latter.
Thanks Gordon, yep we are a starting point and a ways to go. We've got some good stuff coming next month and then a big update toward July/August to get closer to that goal.
An inside preview would be great, we point to Amazon for that as that isn't data available to anyone beyond the big guys who pay to scan every book.
We have around 2,500 books on the site now, and should have around 10,000 by the end of the year. So far more than most book shops I believe.
Please keep in mind that is a very early mockup and I am currently redoing it heavily. But the idea is to recommend books one by one to start, as well as better ways to view them (ignore the bottom of the mockup as that is all being redone).
The back of the book jacket costs about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to license, so I can't do that yet. But down the road I might look at that. For now people can click through to the store to see that too.
$1k-2k per month for the back cover of a single book makes me think that the publishing industry should be explosively disrupted. Not sure how exactly, but that is ridiculous.
Here is an idea: a movement towards exclusively epub with open source DRM and cryptocurrency. And local physical stores can just start printing jackets.
Well that includes all the books metadata like cover image, author etc, but ya I agree :). I think part of the problem is that fee to Ingram is for flat files or their API, and you are basically paying them to centralize what they collect from authors.
> The back of the book jacket costs about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to license, so I can't do that yet.
Wow, what?! If true, that is absolute madness... I mean, it's basically advertising material - as an author, why on earth wouldn't I want it to be as available as possible?
Plus, surely online book shops are not selling $2,000+ of each single book before they break even?
Wait, does the text of the blurb cost $1000-2000/mo? If so, does GoodReads pay that? Because they have the back blurb of every book, don't they?
If it's the specific image of the back of the book, I don't actually see that being make-or-break for anyone. You can put the blurb that's styled vaguely like the back of a book if it makes people read it more.
This site is actually doing something interesting through its curation, and I would be pretty impressed if that was how it was pitched to me.
But I have to agree, expecting a bookstore and then getting something totally other is too much of a clash. If you want a bookstore, nothing's going to beat a bookstore. If this site offers something different, it should be sold on its merits.
Physical bookstores across Europe have dwindling stock of actual books. Instead, a relative few books are kept around as token attempts at being a bookstore, while the owners seek higher profit margins on things like gimmicky stationery, tea sets, vinyl records, etc. So, even physical locations are no longer very useful for discovery. You are lucky if you still have a local bookshop as capable of surprises as back in the 1990s.
Bookselling is truly a sui generis endeavor. A bookstore will typically have thousands of distinct items in inventory with most having only a single copy in stock. For better or for worse, non-book inventory has a much better rate of return for the bookseller than actual books. The trend you describe is not unique to Europe, but has been happening in the US as well. That said, while my local indie does have a lot of non-book inventory for sale, the bulk of their square footage is still books. It's been a while since I was in Europe, but when I was, the bookshops that I visited (mostly in Paris, but I think I may have looked into one in Bruges as well), were all well-stocked with books. Same with my visit to Prague and Vienna in 2008. What I have noticed is that the density of bookstores in the US has declined greatly over the last 30 years. I used to travel a lot to give workshops in LaTeX and I would pull out the pages in the hotel yellow pages to visit all the local bookstores wherever I was teaching¹. This would occupy my evenings for the whole week of my trip. On my last business trip, to Atlanta, about 6 years ago, there were only 6 bookstores I could find in the whole city and two were chain stores.
1. One memorable moment happened in Denver when I didn't realize that the bookstore I was visiting was an adult bookstore. I wandered the shelves wondering why I didn't recognize any of the authors. It wasn't until I returned to my rental car and looked back at the store that I realized what had happened.
That's an interesting trend for Europe. In the US physical bookstores have thrived over the past decade. I can't remember the last place I was - small town or large city - that didn't have a normal physical bookstore filled with actual books, as was common 30 years ago.
Really? I've noticed a huge decline in the numbers of bookstores over the last 30 years. There was a stretch of about 3 blocks near DePaul University in Chicago that had about 8 bookstores in the 80s/90s and now I don't think there's a single bookstores there. 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica used to have about a dozen bookstores and now only has Barnes & Noble (plus an arts and architecture bookshop whose name I don't recall at the moment which used to be on the promenade but moved to Wilshire). Venice Blvd in Venice also had 3 or 4 bookstores which are all gone now.
The number of independent bookstores in the United States was impressively high in 2019, with 1,887 independent bookselling companies running 2,524 stores.
That said, compared to numbers in the 1990s it is down. But lately going up.
I'd say it can never be as fun online. Part of the experience is being physically there, touching the books, feeling their weight, seeing the inside, sitting down on the sofa to read a bit, wandering around, in many stores you can also grab a coffee etc.
Getting a randomized "book feed" is not the same as randomly wandering in a bookstore.
The other thing is that in a bookstore, you can just start reading the book. There’s no limit on how much you can access for free, other than the length of time you’re willing to spend in a bookstore. Which is a real limit, but it doesn’t stop me from becoming invested in what I’m reading, because I know I could theoretically read the whole thing.
Also maybe we could bump into and chat with other store browsers? This started off as a tongue in cheek thought but now I'm thinking this would be a very cool function... :)
I love my local small book stores, but I rarely explore the bookshelves on my own. I go straight to the owner and tell them what book i recently read and what aspects about I liked, which not and ask them what they recommend me reading next. And over time they have a better and better understanding about my tastes. This has worked better for me than any algorithm or crowd sourced recommendations, because neither of them understands why I enjoyed something.
This only works in the small shops where the people there live for books, not in the big chain stores where they just work.
This isn't like 'wandering through a book store' at all. This is a bunch of best of lists written by authors. It's not even close to being comparable to wandering through a book store...this isn't even a new way to discover books. It's just a bunch of recommendations on books on various topics by authors.
Why would you make the description so disingenuous?
Just call it what it is, a curated collection of best of lists...
Then again, I guess that's not really something you can make a Show: HN about.
"In case you’re new to Five Books, the format is: an expert, a topic and the five best books on that topic, explained in an interview. Tip: you’ll normally learn quite a lot about the topic from our interviews, even if you don’t get around to reading all the books."
This looks really great! The browsing part of book/record/media stores never translated online for me, even if finding something specific became instantaneous.
Slight hijacking:
Does anyone have any tips on how to find/browse books for children of varying ages? When I google I find mostly listicles with maybe a couple of takeaways, and amazon categories aren't very helpful to me.
Commonsensemedia (a nonprofit) is good for evaluating some specific piece of media, and has some curated lists, but I'm hoping there's something better for discovery.
My 3 year old loves books, but isn't reading a lot on her own just yet, but any recommendations in the ~5-6yo range welcome. She likes science, food, superheroes, inventions, fantasy probably works too.
I have a 4-year-old so trying to figure out how to make this work for children's book is high on my list (I am hoping to ship a full Children's and YA section toward the Fall 2021). I did try a round of emailing teachers to see if they would be interested in recommending books but that didn't work. I am running tests now with children's authors to see how well that works. And, I am hoping toward the end of the year to use the Ingram API to show age recommendations on books and sort it so you can find books for specific ages (i want this too)...
Personally, I spend a lot of time on Amazon reviews to try to sort through and find good kids books. I still get a fair number of duds there that we give away.
My son is 4 and his favorites right now is the dory fantasmagory series. Some others he loves are big blue truck, snail and the whale (great book and all their books are amazing), gruffalo, mixed up chameleon, the tiger who came to tea, good day good night, Lion Inside (all their books are good), here we are (ditto for his books), the darkest dark (by astronaut), and Giraffes can't dance.
> My son is 4 and his favorites right now is the dory fantasmagory series. Some others he loves are big blue truck, snail and the whale (great book and all their books are amazing), gruffalo, mixed up chameleon, the tiger who came to tea, good day good night, Lion Inside (all their books are good), here we are (ditto for his books), the darkest dark (by astronaut), and Giraffes can't dance.
Perfect. We only have a few of those, and the Gruffalo is a real hit, so I'll definitely check out the others. Thanks a bunch!
To get started with reading we found the “endless reader” apps really caught children’s interest and are quite well done. They help introduce the basics of recognizing words and spelling in an interactive way. Use in conjunction with actual books of course :)
Elephant and Piggie (Mo Willems) are great, they have simple pictures and large, short colourful text mostly in word bubbles, and the stories are quite fun and tend to have plot twists (children love surprises). Highly recommended.
We also had a lot of success with good old Dr. Seuss classics, though those will take a bit longer as they are more complex (though this should give you an idea of how simple Elephant and Piggie are heh)
I've pretty much taken to automatically buying any book anyone recommends on HN[1]. So far it's lead me to a few interesting books I wouldn't have read, for example The Overstory is the most recent one.
Thanks, I am not the orig creator but working with them on this as they are amazing (he even weighted it so it is based on HN Karma). I added RSS to my list of features, but not sure on ETA. Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com and I can update you once I get it added.
I love Five Books (their long form format is fantastic)! Agreed, I am hoping the emergence of Bookshop.org helps a lot more book/reading related sites make enough money to flourish.
Fivebooks.com is very similar, and their interviews/articles are usually high quality content, not just publishing industry fluff that just want to push recently released books of questionable quality, in your face.
For any NLP experts out there, I'd really appreciate your thoughts on what I could do with NLP to help me tag book lists and possibly books with topics...
I am super new to NLP, but I am looking at training a model to help me identify what the book-list is about such as specific person, place, specific event, group of people, medical condition, etc...
Hi Ben, nice site. I'm no NLP expert but it might be worth taking a look at huggingface; they offer a simple API for all sorts of models. It looks like you'll be interested in their Zero-Shot Classification models in particular, e.g., https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-mnli. Try dropping some text in the box and see how it goes. Good luck!
I'm sick and tired of curated lists of books, whether it's by Amazon or anyone else.
Does Amazon present enough of an API that a person could write a user interface that allowed browsing of books by Dewey Decimal (or LOC)? Searching by name or some internal search engine's idea of how to maximize profits is crazy-making.
As a side note, I didn't like the bookstore model when it was applied to some libraries, much less a website. It's not appropriate for large collections and God knows there's plenty of top ten lists on the web.
note to self: Could libgen be presented in Dewey Decimal form?
From the title, I was expecting some sort of google maps style walk through a library thing. But this is good! I found a category I was interested in and wanted to buy every book in it. Loved the personal notes.
Awesome site, Ben! Curation is really hard. I was with a company called Roadtrippers where we were curating road trip destinations and had the same passion about travel as you do about reading.
There is a zen about browsing in a bookstore, and I see what you're going for here. The aisle experience, the recommendations from the wonderful book nerds who work there, author recommendations.
Some of the best bookstores host live author readings and Q+A. Have you thought about doing these to promote your site? Platforms for that are taking off (CH and Spaces). Keep up the good work!
Thanks :), do you have any tips on curation? I could use them :)
Great idea! I'd love to do author readings/events. I am hoping I can start peeking at what that would require later this summer. I felt like they would be ghost towns if I didn't have a way to get them in front of the right traffic/readers. I am aiming to ship true topic pages this summer and I felt like then I can show events to people who might be interested.
For example, I recently attended a paid online talk by an author called Guy Walters on the real life Great Escape During WW2 (https://www.crowdcast.io/guywalters - he does these talks often and they are awesome). I felt like I couldn't effective promote it unless I have a topic page about World War 2 to gather signups.
What do you think?
How would you connect raw traffic to events they are interested in?
How would you connect raw traffic to events they are interested in?
Go where they hang with ads: ex. wwII podcasts, r/ww2 subreddit. Where did you see the Guy Walters talk? Advertise there! Start with your most trafficked topics. Analytics are your friend. Same goes for curated content.
Thanks :). When they are on Shepherd I am thinking about how to divide them out into interest beyond topics. i.e. I wouldn't want to pitch a WW2 book reading to people not interested in WW2.
I love the layout, the font combo and spacing really work for me. The website looks very "genuine" and "sincere". A lot of work must have gone into it! Have bookmarked it.
I’m also impressed by the speed of the site. Well done!
One thing book stores have is gifts for people. “Someone who wants a book about dream interpretation may enjoy a rare minerals Rubin’s cube” may be a good way to increase your average referral fee.
And don’t forget cards and stationary!
You’ve got the layout down. Now I want to see more of the other items I see when browsing a bookstore!
Thanks, we are using CloudFlare and heavily cached. Plus I have an amazing developer who did an amazing job (and we use only Plausible.io for some basic stats). It is so nice to launch a site with no user component... :)
Thanks :), a lot of data entry over the last 6 weeks... I manually created 410 book lists, 2,311 books along with book cover images, and 2,453 author profiles. I've got a better backend system now so that I can get some help with the data entry to speed up that side of things.
The fact that there's a list for a topic so narrow ("The Best Books On The Parthian Empire" [0]) on the front page makes me like this a lot. Definitely bookmarked.
Not that I've looked elsewhere for a list of books on the Parthians, but that does certainly fulfill the "discover" part in the title.
Is there more to this than just "curated book lists"? I found that the only option was to scroll through the list and see if there was a topic that caught my attention, and once I found an interesting one, it was just a list of books. Plenty of platforms have this feature. For me, having someone else pick my reading list doesn't have much appeal to me either, especially if that "someone else" is a startup that has an agenda of their own.
Yep, good question, this is just the start, and next we will relate those book lists to each other to help you follow topics you might be interested in. As well as eventually pages around topics like WW2, Grief, The Cold War, etc.
These book recommendations are all recommended by experts in those fields and they they pick those with no input from us.
Escaping the suggestion algorithm is what the physical bookstore does for me. Yes suggestions can be helpful to a point but limit the ability for discovery.
Books in general are about discovery whether that is discovering knowledge or discovering new worlds. A bookstore is an extension of this.
Lists do this to some degree but someone has done the discovery for you. ( and I don't have the answer here ) But we need to find a way to allow the discovery to occur.
Really great site! I just found a handful of books to add to the pile.
One piece of hopefully constructive criticism. In the topic list drop "The" from the leading word for alphabetizing, or at least disregard it. As someone who often looks for a topic/title in lists, I hate having to consider if I will find it where I expect, or if I need to dive into the great morass of "The..."
Thanks :), ya I don't actually have topic support yet, that is hacked together from a variable I use to construct the meta description. I am working to add true topic support along with topic pages and will ship that toward July/August to really improve it.
Wow, this is amazing. I have a really hard time finding books I'm interested in reading, but basically every list I clicked on on here got me excited about every book. Having someone well versed in such specific topics not only sorts the wheat from the chaff, but reading their passionate descriptions of each book they chose makes me excited to read them. Thank you this is fantastic!
Yep, I am working on adding true topic support and search to get you to the right place toward July/August :). Right now the homepage is pretty basic as we are just getting started.
A humble suggestion would be to remove "The Best Books On .." prefix for every title, maybe just having it once at the top, as it creates a bit of friction while skimming trough the list, and I think is already implicit that it's a selection.
I would also add that the "best" label is so overused by marketing best-of list sites on the internet these days that its very presence is a little suspicious. I would consider different wording. Perhaps "richest," "most worthwhile," "excellent," etc.
Ya the problem is that people use it to search for books 95% of the time, and they think that way :). It is this weird thing where I'd like to avoid it, but you can't if you want to connect with how people think and search for books.
Hi Ben, really nice site, bookmarked. I am curious, if you are open to sharing, what your business model is? I assume Amazon affiliates or similar, but do you have other plans for monetisation or is this more a side project for you? Either way, congrats!
Yep I am very happy to share details. And, I will write more about this as I test monetization options here (http://build.shepherd.com/).
This is a FT project for me (and a huge passion project as well). I am lucky in that I have had several business exits and I can afford to work on this without worrying about the money. That said, I need to eventually build a business around it because I do have costs for the amazing developer I work with, the amazing designer, and a few PT people that help with data entry. And, I'd like to accelerate development with the money the site generates.
For the next 3 years my focus is on growing the content, features, and traffic.
In the short term I have affiliate links to Amazon and Bookshop.org. I am not sure that will be enough to create a sustainable business but I should have more data within 3 to 6 months to know how that is going to play out.
I have some crazier/wild ideas I want to try eventually, but those require a lot more traffic. For example, I'd like to try putting a book ad in between books 4 and 5 on every book recommendation page, and see if that is a good model (the idea being like Google PPC to do book ads on specific topics and thus a higher CTR / interest from readers). I'd like to find ways to help authors make more while I also am making more. Such as autographed book sales, selling posters/art related to books and trying to monetize some of their IP more, and so on.
I am also playing with the idea of doing a Kick Starter or similar where I match what readers give to help get this going a little faster and giving a group VIP status within the site.
I would love personalized recommendations as well (something that a person working at a book store could perform). That is, you've read and liked A, B and C, have you also read D? Or something like: "You've read many books by author X, he just released a new book".
In that regard, I would also like to know the sequences of books that people read to get involved in a given topic. What are the books to enter a field? What books should you read after you've dipped your toes in?
I'm developing algorithms for these kind of tasks. Get in touch if you want to discuss it.
Yep, I am dreaming about something called BookDNA but it requires user accounts and a book API to make it function (I believe). I am hoping to start that late this year or early next. Can I grab your email or send me one as I'd love to chat about this! (ben@shepherd.com)
Hey, thanks for sharing more info. I am always interested in how people think about monetisation. I don't have any particular suggestions other than to wish you best of luck with it, I will be along for the ride :)
Figure this is as good a place as any to ask this: I have been looking for good books to read for learning about foreign policy. Didn't see any foreign policy lists on the linked cite, wanted to see if any users had recommendations :)
I actually was hoping that this would be a 3D game-like environment, where you walk around a library and are able to click on a book and it appears in your hands and you can flip through a few pages, rotate it, examine the cover...
Does it do the thing where you can find a book that fell down from the shelf behind in another topic that might actually be more interesting than what you were looking for?
Yep, topics is really a hacked together concept right now and we are adding a full implementation over the coming months. That will be shipped toward July and fix all that :)
Yep, that is due to some of the mess with the fake topic setup we have now. It is due to be cleaned up as we build out real topic support long term, and short term I am looking to improve that card format.
The thing about a physical bookstore is that everything is not smushed down into beige metadata. The neon green cover says something. The 6" x 6" x 2" book stands out from its tradebound neighbors.
Some books are spine out. Some books are front cover spaced. Some wrapped in plastic. Some beaten to soft corners by years of thumb throughs.
The smell of paper and ink.
Other people around who love books.
Holding and turning to see the price and opening to a random page to see how it reads.
And used bookstores stocked full with pieces of other people's life.
I am trying to create an online experience that is like wandering through your local bookstore. Along with little notes pointing out great books by people who really know that topic. For the beta launch, I’ve got a little over 400 book recommendation lists by authors on specific subjects. These are all hand curated.
Some of my favorites:
The Best Books On The Power And Wonder of Mathematics https://shepherd.com/best-books/power-and-wonder-mathematics
The Best Books On The Meaning Of Life https://shepherd.com/best-books/meaning-of-life Tom is one of my favorite video essayists and worth a watch.
The Best Books For Understanding Human Nature https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-human-nature
This is just the start and I have a lot of improvements coming. I will be adding related book lists so that you can keep following your curiosity from list to list.
I know the homepage is a bit shitty. I will add actual topic support and topic pages this summer (and an improved card format coming soon for the listings on the bottom).
I am hoping to get into NLP later this year to help me with topics around the books and book lists.
Feel free to ask me anything!
My email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to say hi or share some thoughts, Thanks, Ben