[HN Gopher] Show HN: See what readers who loved your favorite bo...
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Show HN: See what readers who loved your favorite book/author also
loved to read
Hi HN, Every year, we ask thousands of readers (and authors) to
share their 3 favorite reads of the year. Now you can enter a
book/author you love and see what books readers loved who also
loved that book/author. Try it here:
https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 This goes wide and doesn't try to
limit itself to the genre, so you get some interesting results.
What do you think? Background: I want better recommendations
based on my reading history. I'm incredibly frustrated with what is
out there. This system is based on 5,000 readers voting on their 3
favorite reads from 2023 to 2025. So, this covers ~15,000 books and
is a high-quality vote. We wanted to keep the dataset small for now
while we play with approaches. We are building a full Book DNA app
that pulls in your Goodreads history and delivers deeply
personalized book recommendations based on people who like similar
books (a significant challenge). You can sign up to beta test it
here if you want to help me with that:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VOm8XOMU0ygMSTSKi9F0nExnGwo...
The first beta is coming out in late January, but it's pretty basic
to start. Past Show HNs as we've built Shepherd:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40084193
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38600246
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660 Thanks, looking
forward to your comments :) Ben
Author : bwb
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-12-29 11:58 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shepherd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shepherd.com)
| bwb wrote:
| Btw, if you want to share your 3 favorite reads of the year,
| please share those here:
|
| https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads/login?next=/bboy/my...
|
| You get a cool page like this:
|
| https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025/f/bwb
|
| I read ~130 books this year, and my 3 favorites of the year were:
|
| Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
|
| I kept seeing recommendations for this book on Shepherd, but I
| was reluctant to try it. Many years ago, I tried a progressive
| fantasy book, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. This was a
| colossal mistake on my part because Dungeon Crawler Carl is
| AMAZING. This is one of the funniest and most beautiful books I
| have ever read. The satire is biting, and I love the characters
| from the bottom of my heart. If you love the TV show "Always
| Sunny in Philadelphia," you will love the dark, absurd humor of
| this book. And this book isn't all laughter; the characters often
| moved me to tears as they try to hold on to their humanity in the
| face of utter inhumanity and insanity.
|
| The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter
|
| One of my favorite concepts in the book is called a "misogi." It
| is this idea of taking on one massive challenge each year, with a
| 50/50 chance of failure (don't die is rule #1).
|
| Fall of Giants by Ken Follett
|
| This book series is pure magic. It's hard to put into words what
| Ken Follett has accomplished. I read a LOT of historical fiction,
| and I've never found another series that lets you live through
| history with characters you love, while also showing the sweeping
| forces that shape the world.
|
| It makes for intense reading because you will experience the day-
| to-day reality of fighting for women's right to vote in England
| or resisting the Nazi party's slow takeover of Germany, and you
| do this through the eyes of characters you have grown to love.
| You feel what it is like on a daily basis, frustrated with the
| pace of change, and also just living the regular ups and downs of
| your life. It feels like the life you are living right now.
|
| At the same time, you can see the big waves coming and want to
| scream at them to do more, even though they might not be able to
| do more. And sometimes you watch as the waves break over them
| without any warning or care. But throughout it all, you
| understand why these waves are happening with incredible clarity.
| Insanity wrote:
| Dungeon Crawler Carl has been on my TBR for some time. But your
| review saying it's like Always Sunny made me want to read that
| next. I love the dark humour in that series.
| bwb wrote:
| It is so good :), this one is a bit more absurdist, I think,
| but equally dark. I read them over 2 weeks last Christmas. I
| hope they are a match for you!
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| I'd be glad to share my top 3 2025 reads but I'd like to do so
| without having to create an account or link to Google for
| authentication.
| bwb wrote:
| Yep, I've got a plan to eventually look at how we can do
| that, while still protecting the system from bots/spam (of
| which there are a lot).
|
| It is a challenge. For now, we need it behind a login system.
| We try to make it as easy as possible, since most people have
| a Google account.
| chris_st wrote:
| Recommended this to a friend who _hates_ keeping track of "how
| many" kinds of things, and was dismayed at having to say how
| many books they've read (which they really don't want to do)
| and found they couldn't skip that question.
|
| Maybe make it optional?
| bwb wrote:
| Yeah, sorry, it was on my list to make optional or remove
| this year, but I didn't have time. It is on there, and I'll
| see what I can do tomorrow.
|
| The original idea was that we should weight votes more if
| someone has read 50 or 100 books, since their 3 favorites
| might receive a higher vote than someone who has read 12.
| Rough idea that we haven't tested yet on the data.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Looks like a cool idea, but I can't find my authors in there.
| bwb wrote:
| Ah gotcha, which ones are you looking for?
|
| So far, we only have ~5,000 votes for ~15,000 books over 2023
| to 2025. We are still small but growing fast. Any chance you
| would share your 3 favorites this year and help us grow?
|
| We are working on doing this on a much bigger scale and
| building a beta now too.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I looked for Glen Cook[0], who is a well-known SF author for
| decades (and is still writing).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Cook
| bwb wrote:
| Nice, Black Company :)
|
| Sorry, nobody has picked one of his books as one of their 3
| favorite reads of the year yet. We only have ~15,000 votes
| so far, but as we get more, that number will increase. We
| are working to improve this in 2026 as we grow.
|
| We do have this if you want to see books like Glen Cook's:
|
| https://shepherd.com/books-in-order/chronicles-of-the-
| black-...
|
| https://shepherd.com/search/author/10415
| eastoeast wrote:
| Sweet, looking now to get some recommendations! I'm actually
| surprised more people don't have my two favorites overlapped more
| often (Mistborn and Name of the Wind)!
|
| Question: when you don't search a book, it shows "Loved by X
| people", when you do, it shows "Book twins". I'd be really
| interested in seeing most frequently loved books, from people
| that like the book/books I'm searching. It would make it obvious
| I'm missing something!
| bwb wrote:
| I'm surprised too, as that is one I overlap on :)
|
| We are working to do it based on frequency as part of the
| bigger app we are building right now. And show that. I'm hoping
| we might get that in this for next year.
|
| On the broader site, we do have "books like" Kingkiller
| Chronicles, and it does them based on the frequency they are
| associated together in the lists by humans:
| https://shepherd.com/books-in-order/the-kingkiller-chronicle...
|
| (funny enough, the most recommended book alongside Kingkiller
| is Mistborn)
|
| And Mistborn here: https://shepherd.com/books-in-
| order/mistborn/books-like
|
| So we take the 12,000 book lists authors have made, and use
| that to generate these.
|
| What do you think?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| You overlap with my antifavorites, if that counts.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Previous effort in this space:
|
| https://www.literature-map.com/
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| Nice, I think you should try replacing the book cover images with
| a short synopsis of the book, as I find many of the book covers
| off-putting.
| Insanity wrote:
| The embodiment of "don't judge a book by its cover" lol.
|
| IMO it's cleaner to have the cover and then click into to read
| the description. But I do see your point, more information
| density can improve the overall UX flow.
| BeetleB wrote:
| LibraryThing (https://www.librarything.com/home) has a nice
| feature where you can find people whose books have the strongest
| overlap as yours.
|
| When I first entered all the books I thought I had read into LT,
| and clicked on the feature, the top match had several books by a
| completely different author. I had read many of his works and had
| totally forgotten to add them to my collection! It was magic!
| analogpixel wrote:
| 100 Books like Project Hail Mary (https://shepherd.com/books-
| like/project-hail-mary) :
|
| - Travels with Charley : With Charley, his French poodle,
| Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines
| with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in
| San Francisco.
|
| - Invisible Women : Data is fundamental to the modern world. From
| economic development, to healthcare, to education and public
| policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial
| decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account
| gender, because it treats men as the default and women as
| atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And
| women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and
| often with their lives.
|
| then, if you love Andy Weir, you'll love this romance novel: The
| Duke's Christmas Redemption by Arietta Richmond
|
| and then after scrolling through even more book recommendations
| I'm assuming are just ads:
|
| Interested in time loop, philosophy, and time travel?
|
| which is weird, because Project Hail Mary wasn't about time loops
| or time travel.
|
| This is why I dislike recommendations on the internet anymore,
| it's just a cash grab to get some click through profit to amazon.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| tying this data to a login instead of a pure cookie model like
| hn seems dangerous.
| bwb wrote:
| This feature doesn't require a login; you just put in the
| book/author you love, and it returns matches.
|
| If you want to vote, you'll need to log in. We needed
| substantial protection around the votes, and this was the
| easiest way to do so.
|
| Would you want a magic link that sends you a url to vote to
| your email or something like that?
| bwb wrote:
| We are working toward breaking even on costs while still adding
| new features. All the money we raise goes toward those costs,
| which are quite lean. I've worked on this project since Dec
| 2020 for free, plus put a LOT of my own savings into it :)
|
| Hope that helps, and I am happy to answer questions, and more
| on our mission for readers and authors ->
| https://building.shepherd.com/
|
| The ads on the books-like page are clearly marked, a different
| color, and they are partly how we fund being alive. If we had
| ~3,000 members, we could remove them. Currently, we have around
| 800.
| patja wrote:
| I'd be interested in a filtering feature where you could pick a
| book and disregard all data from anyone who has it listed as one
| of their favorites.
| bwb wrote:
| Yep, the full app will use negative ratings as much as positive
| :)
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(page generated 2025-12-29 23:01 UTC)