from Hacker News

For book lover, do you like my idea on selectist.com?

by steveneo on 3/4/14, 10:23 AM with 9 comments

I just launched a website http://www.selectist.com where people talk about the books they love. It’s based on lists of your favourite books, not book ratings or reviews. You create lists of your top 3 -5 books on any topic and can see what other people think too. The key concept is a list of books can build up more meaningful context among books rather than a single book links others by keywords or individual interest etc.

Please check out www.selectist.com and let me know what you think of the idea and the site. Any feedback, comments, questions or random thought would be greatly appreciated.

  • by brudgers on 3/5/14, 4:17 AM

    Three tweets doesn't build enough context for me. A product in the book space needs to express a passion for books and that's hard to do without acting as if books are worth the investment of time spent reading. I think of BookTV and the New York Times Sunday section and the back of The Nation.

    "Let me tell you about this great book" can't be pulled off in 200 words. If that's all you have to say, it wasn't that good.

    Frequently, there will be an "Ask HN: Where Can I Find the Hacker News for X" Usually I think, well that would be Hacker News. But as I was writing my reply, I thought 'a Hacker News for books just might work". Push the big idea about which you have passion harder. Good luck.

  • by drygh on 3/4/14, 12:36 PM

    Interesting idea. I mainly read philosophy, classics, and some fiction. Anyway, I think between Goodreads and Amazon reviews, I can generally get a feel of what to expect. They also have the advantage because independent review/recommender systems are the norm, and they work for most people. I think reviews and recommendations are tough to get in to when you have a huge chicken/egg problem. Even if you aggregated all reviews for a book and added something unique on top, it's only making the experience marginally better.

    I do think having unique context could be pretty interesting. The narrower and more specific a list, the more value it would add. Having a "My Top 5 Books" list provides no value to me. A recommender algorithm will win at that game. However, having a "Romantic Thrillers Where Protagonist Gets Kidnapped While On Vacation" list is at least something unique. I think search could be kind of addictive if there were tons of random and extremely narrow lists. If you did go this route it seems collaborating to build the lists would be pretty cool. Having lists tied to a user seems like it would make it harder to come up with really unique and narrow lists as a community. Maybe you could have both?

  • by akbarnama on 3/4/14, 2:12 PM

  • by marvvelous on 3/4/14, 1:25 PM

    GoodReads has lists pretty locked up for me. Discovery isn't perfect but Selectist seems to be more of what we already have. I'd love to see some innovation here though. Maybe some exhaustive normalized tagging and filtering (AND, OR, NOT).

  • by VonGallifrey on 3/11/14, 12:16 PM

    The Site looks good, but when I tried to search for something I instinctively typed it in the huge Text Input in the Top only to discover that this is not a Search but a create instead. Is there a way to search the Site?

  • by camillomiller on 3/4/14, 2:28 PM

    Nice. I created a Vonnegut books list, but the output is not in the original order.