[HN Gopher] Show HN: Zeneca - Share and discuss your favorite books
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Zeneca - Share and discuss your favorite books
Author : stopachka
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-03-08 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zeneca.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (zeneca.io)
| aninuth wrote:
| This is really helpful, thank you! It's been mentioned before
| here, but what are your plans for privacy/monetization? Also (out
| of curiosity) where are you getting the book data from? It's
| pretty exhaustive and fast, but the only problem is that it
| doesn't prioritize the "real" version of the book (ie when I
| start typing Fahrenheit 451, the actual book is further down and
| stuff like the cliffnotes version or literary analyses come up
| first).
| nezaj wrote:
| Hey Aninuth, co-creator Joe here! Thanks for all the comments.
| Will try to respond to all of them before
|
| 1) Privacy / Monetization: We're big believers that users
| should own their own data. We have no plans to sell your data
| to anyone. In terms of monetization, there are several
| approaches. We can add affiliate links to all books on
| bookshelves. We can build a freemium model. We can have authors
| promote books. The list goes on. For now we aren't focusing on
| monetization -- but rather focusing on building an awesome
| product that gives people what they actually want :)
|
| 2) Source of data. For now we are using Google Books api!
|
| 3) Thanks for the feedback re: ordering. We'll keep this mind
| and think about how we can improve our search results.
| loosetypes wrote:
| Interesting. How have you found the Google Books api so far?
| aninuth wrote:
| Appreciate the response and love the product! I've tried
| multiple alternatives to Goodreads for organizing my books
| and have resigned myself to spreadsheets; really hoping this
| turns into something mainstream. Best of luck!
| baumandm wrote:
| This is great! I love the aesthetics and I've been waiting years
| for someone to provide a viable alternative to Goodreads.
| stopachka wrote:
| Brought a smile to read, thank you baumandm!
| throw0932439 wrote:
| Looks interesting, but is there anyway to import books? I have
| everything on goodreads (which offers a csv export). No way I'm
| re-adding hundreds of books by hand.
| pronoiac wrote:
| Wow, it's going to take some work to get your name out from under
| the SEO shadow of AstraZeneca, and considering their COVID-19
| vaccine, uh, I'd change my name.
| ilolu wrote:
| This is a great idea and site looks really nice. If you don't
| mind me asking, how did you get the book data with book images.
| ?. I too want to build on an idea involving books.
| nezaj wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words ilolu! We used Google Books API
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Great idea! But,
|
| <rant> I'm not going to give you MY content, for free, if you
| don't AT LEAST allow for my content, and the content of my peers
| on your website, to be in a format which is easy to export and
| edit.
|
| You know why?
|
| Because in a couple of years you will raise more money, and your
| VC will tell you that a subscription business is a great idea,
| you will follow him, and I will need to decide between paying you
| $X per month, or stop using the service. I don't want to get
| there again.
|
| </rant>
|
| Nothing against you personally. But perhaps there's a way to
| promise potential customers that you're not going to screw them
| eventually.
|
| Edit: to be clear, a "format which is easy to export and edit"
| means two things: something like markdown, and a single button
| which allows me to download everything I ever wrote on your
| website.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Likewise, I don't see this working for me in a few years time.
| Are there compelling reasons to use this today if I hope to use
| it in 5 years?
|
| This is why I generally only use things online that I can pay
| for, these days. It tends to ensure some degree of longer term
| service.
| vladsanchez wrote:
| I concur and support you! It will play out like that.
| vladsanchez wrote:
| Congrats on your launch! I once had a similar idea for which I
| registered but never actioned thereadinglog.com. Fear of Failure!
| :facepalm:
| stopachka wrote:
| Hey HN,
|
| We're Joe & Stopa, from https://zeneca.io. We're building the
| successor to Goodreads. For now, you can create public
| bookshelves (i.e https://zeneca.io/stopa), discover like-minded
| readers, and share your favorite quotes and thoughts (i.e here's
| all I learned from PG:
| https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ)
|
| We left our jobs in June last year to build a company together
| (but we didn't have an idea... yet!). Since then we've shipped
| several projects. Our criteria for each project was 1) it had to
| be something we wanted for ourselves and 2) each project had to
| be more ambitious than the previous.
|
| One day, Joe said that he wanted to share his favorite books
| online, but found most places did not do this in an elegant way.
| We noticed that the people we admired used plain lists on their
| personal websites, rather than Goodreads.
|
| So we thought, hey, surely this can't be the best way to do
| things. Maybe there's a space here to fill what's missing. From
| there, we built a static version of the site, and shared it with
| our friends: https://zeneca.io/joe + https://zeneca.io/stopa
|
| This got enough interest, that we coded up the backend, so anyone
| could create public book pages. So far, 300 people have created
| their own public book pages.
|
| Once book pages were in, more ideas start to sprout. We try to
| discuss books all over the place: from twitter comments to sparse
| reddit groups. What if there was a place just for this? You could
| find like-minded readers, have deeper discussions, and save all
| those conversations. When you wanted to share a book with a
| friend, they'd be able to "see" your experience of going through
| it.
|
| To support that, we introduced quotes and thoughts. You can write
| thoughts about your favorite books, and they'll show up on your
| public page. Others can send you super cute hearts.
|
| This is still very rough. We want to hack together more features,
| that can help you really engage with books. One thing we hope, is
| to siphon time off of Twitter and FB, and move it to something
| much more enriching: discussing and exploring favorite books.
|
| Please try it out, we'd appreciate your feedback : )
|
| ---
|
| For the technically curious, the site was all built in Clojure.
| It's been a joy to use. One surprise for us, was just how
| powerful Postgres is. Coming from big companies, it's easy to
| move towards more complicated setups -- however Postgres does a
| phenomenal job of helping you handle a few users without getting
| in your way, and going much further.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I LOVE the idea!! (as long as you don't become the next FB and
| sell-off everything you can collect:) it's a very useful tool
| to find more good reads and
|
| 1) are you planning to introduce passwords?
|
| 2) what are your thoughts on adding privacy settings?
|
| 2a) perhaps I want my account to be visible to only a few
| people, and not to everyone
|
| 2b) perhaps I like reading 'naughty' books that I don't want
| visible to everyone, but only selected people
|
| 3) any chance you can have a (simple comment section a-la HN)
| where we can 'debate'/argue/comment/discuss a book? (as you
| mentioned)
|
| EDIT:
|
| 1) Who is paying for all that?
|
| 2) Add a privacy policy please (with the right content), and
| how are you treating GDPR?
| nezaj wrote:
| Co-creator Joe here! Thanks for all the questions! Will try
| to address each one point by point below
|
| 1) Initially we went with magic links because we thought that
| would be a better UX. It's been surprising and amusing to see
| how much feedback we get on this. We hear you loud and clear
| and will budget some time to move auth from magic links to
| passwords / o-auth
|
| 2) Privacy settings make sense! We'll be baking this in the
| near future :)
|
| 3) Comments and discussion are coming soon!
|
| In terms of paying -- Stopa and I are both running on our
| savings for now :) Our main focus is to build something
| awesome that we ourselves love and other people want.
| Assuming we succeed at that, when the time for monetization
| comes we will never sell user data (this is a first principle
| for us).
|
| Prior to this Show HN we hadn't gotten any feedback re:
| adding a privacy policy -- we hear you loud and clear and
| will add that in. For GDPR, we are big believers that users
| should own their own data and will build out data export and
| account deletion features in the future.
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| I signed up and started playing around with it, and I think it
| looks promising.
|
| Some general thoughts:
|
| - Moving over my shelves is an undertaking that'll probably
| take more than 30-40 minutes. Before I do that, I'd like the
| know about the privacy policy you folks intend to put in place.
|
| - On a similar note, potential monetization is also something
| which worries me because many-a-times monetization comes at the
| cost of compromising on my privacy.
|
| - I'd also like to know if exporting the data would be possible
| down the line.
|
| Some UI, UX thoughts:
|
| 1. On the https://www.zeneca.io/library page, there are too
| many fonts, too many font sizes going on. Explicitly, there is
| (i) different font size, (AND SPACING!) for "Go to published
| library" (12.8 px), (ii) another font size for "Change your
| avatar" (0.9 em) , (iii) another one (understandable, in this
| case) for my name (1.3 em), (iv) another size for intro (16
| px), (v) another for shelf description (1.1 em), (vi) another
| for shelf name (1.5 em) and (vii) another (18.72 px) for fin.
| That's too many font sizes. I strongly recommend sticking to
| three, or four. I would also recommend to fix the spacing on
| "go to published library".
|
| 2. On a similar note, I'm thinking if the avatars could be
| generated using Spectral (the font used elsewhere), instead of
| a sans-serif font which looks terribly out of place on the
| page. Consider using something with a bunch of ligatures ;)
|
| 3. On the main page (`/explore`), in the text "Got feedback?
| Let us know on twitter", you've also italicized the emoji. In
| my opinion, that looks unnatural, and you're probably better
| off italicizing just the text.
|
| 4. On the same page, avatars (in the left sidebar) have
| shadows, but that's the only place avatars have shadows.
| They're not shadowed (is that a word?) on the `/library` page,
| or the published page.
|
| 5. Minor suggestion: There is no way of navigating to the list-
| of-blog-posts page from the Getting Started Blogpost. There's
| actually no way of getting there at all since
| https://www.zeneca.io/blog/ returns a 404 page. This is a bit
| unusual since the Getting started page is at
| https://www.zeneca.io/blog/getting-started.
|
| (edit) 6. On the published page, the tabs are presented
| weirdly. It could be that I'm mistaken but in my understanding
| of tabs, the active one is usually in bold font, black color.
| The inactive ones are the ones painted blue indicating that
| they can be clicked upon to navigate to them. In your case, on
| https://www.zeneca.io/<username>, the default, and active tab -
| "Library" is colored blue, and "Timeline" is colored black.
| This suggests that I'm on the timeline tab, and can click on
| library to go to it, when in fact just the opposite is true.
|
| PS: I love the box shadow on the shelves ;)
|
| I understand that this is a very early version of the site.
| Kudos for having some working thing. My suggestions above are
| in no way a criticism of the idea. I sure hope you folks whip
| up a much needed replacement to Goodreads. Godspeed.
| stopachka wrote:
| This is such awesome feedback! Thank you for taking the time
| to go so deep geraltofrivia
|
| Privacy Policy: Hear you loud and clear. We'll prioritize
| this
|
| Monetization: Both of us believe users should own their data,
| and we would reject any monetization that would involve
| selling data. There are some paths we're considering
| (freemium, community memberships, working with authors), but
| our first priority, is to make something people actually use.
|
| Export: Heck yeah. We'll prioritize this. In the meantime, if
| you need to export data, send a ping and we'll do it manually
|
| 1) - 5) We'll fast follow on all of these -- excellent
| points!
|
| Gratitude again, can't wait to iterate.
| nrao123 wrote:
| This is a great idea.
|
| You mention: "We noticed that the people we admired used plain
| lists on their personal websites"
|
| Any way to collect book reccomendations from public sources and
| preload it? I imagine this maybe some manual work but the
| utility will be great.
|
| For e.g.: Gates - https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-
| Gates/Summer-Books-202... Collision :
| https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf Andreessen -
| https://www.goodbooks.io/people/marc-andreessen
|
| Btw - I just noticed while googling that this may be what
| GoodBooks.io is attempting
| nezaj wrote:
| Great idea nrao123! We've done a bit of this: (1) Naval's
| recommended reading
| https://www.zeneca.io/navalsrecommendreading, and (2) the
| most re-read books from a popular twitter thread
| https://www.zeneca.io/reread (this was came with a fun blog
| post about Clojure!)
|
| Definitely think there's something to this. Perhaps even
| people historically -- for example, I'd be very curious about
| Victor Hugo's favorite books, etc
|
| We'll consider going deeper on this.
| byproxy wrote:
| I dig the simplicity.
|
| Is there an email address to send feedback to? I don't use
| Twitter.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-08 23:01 UTC)