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Comment by netzone | Hacker News Reader

I'm an avid reader, and I can say that Kindle, Goodreads, Google Books all fill the use case of finding new books to read, but is very lacking in the tracking department. I've had some small plans of making an app/site that just focuses on the tracking part, making and managing a list of books to read/already read with local ratings. I also want the ability to subscribe to an author or a book series and be notified of new releases.

I haven't been able to find a good service that does this in a good way. I have a prototype working pretty good right now, the only problem is that the book databases I use isn't that good sadly.

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Have you looked at LibraryThing? https://www.librarything.com

> I also want the ability to subscribe to an author or a book series and be notified of new releases.

I also want this and am kind of surprised it doesn't exist (or if it does, I haven't seen it). "Following" certain authors on Kindle doesn't seem to have done anything useful, either.

You can have Goodreads do something like this, in the newsletters and other mail section you can check the 'send me the monthly new releases email', 'only send this to me if it includes an author I've read', and click the customize button and deselect all of the genres.

And then you end up with an email which has new releases by authors you've read before.

I generally have no use for most of what Goodreads does, but this combined with the ability to pull my Kindle purchases in automatically is pretty useful.

What book database do you use? I've been looking into this as well... but its' problematic getting book summaries from somewhere that isn't wikipedia.

I'm using the google books api, then indexing my results in a database for referencing etc. It's working pretty well so far.

Have you come across LibraryThing before? From what you're looking for in terms of tracking, list management etc it should meet your needs. The only bit i'm not sure about is the ability to subscribe to new releases by an author author or in a series.

Just tried it out for a while right now. It seems to work reasonably well actually, but adding multiple books seems like a chore. Fictfact, as stated below seems to be better in this regard, and it appears you can also subsribe to authors/series there!

You mean you want to make a clone of fictfact

Actually, I had no idea this site even existed, but yeah I guess I do. It seems to do what I want it to, and I'll probably use it actually.

I still think I could improve on the interface and make it more to my taste though, so I'll continue on with my project.

As for why you were downvoted, your post comes off as moderately hostile/negative and would probably have been received better had you put it differently.

You are correct about the downvoting should have just mentioned fictfact meets most of your requirements . Btw fictfact is limited to series only so if you like a particular author unless they release another book as part of series you won't be notified about it. I think the biggest problem is that series information is not part of the standard metadata for books so you can not get information from isbndb etc. And have to manually curate it. Amazon has added series metadata to its listings but they usually don't have short stories and where they belong in the series. So I would recommend giving the ability to add books to a series to users etc to your app or website. With fictfact as the number of books and series has increased the people maintaining it need crowdsourced help in adding new books and series.

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