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182 pointsjacquesm63 comments

Please provide normal links, because I always (always, always, always...) open lots of links in new tabs. Not being able to middle-click/control-click the links is a huge usability defect.

The site was virtually unusable for me due to this, it really is critical.

It will be fixed very shortly. I appreciate the comments.

These are some HTML5-ish buttons I borrowed from another site. I had a bit of trouble with the links, so I just added the onclick code. Never occurred to me the different usage pattern.

EDIT: Ctrl-Click now working in dev. I should have it pushed up to production in the next few minutes. Sorry about the trouble. -- Done.

Thank you very much for taking notice. :)

I'm an inveterate multitasker and if my middle-click/vimium breaks or the links are otherwise odd (not to mention the noticeable lag the html5 elements were causing for google chrome OS X) it throws me way off my rhythm.

Nice, very nice. There are a lot of good critiques in the comments and I might agree with some... But my initial gut reaction was 'yes - I get what this is and like the basic design...'

I would imagine in time links to the actual HN discussions of the book might be nice (though it would not be too hard to google that oneself).

I open links in tabs too - so I would agree with that comment.

More 'click to sort' options, maybe by language.

For a Beta example site I liked it. Good start.

Feature request: Please detect user's country and use appropriate amazon locale. eg I need to see .co.uk links not .com

Better still would be the ability to select user country / language rather than have that decision taken for me. I am in Portugal and would like to be able to select my Amazon locale to be either the UK or USA and not my local Amazon site which is in France.

EDIT: Just change .com to .co.uk and you'll get the same page on Amazon UK. Sadly the exchange rate seems to be $1 = £1 - at least for the few books I checked.

> just change .com to .co.uk and you'll get the same page on Amazon UK

This works for other locales as well, like Amazon.ca. However it will not work for Kindle ebooks.

What is the practical difference for you between the sites? Do the books ship faster and cheaper for .co.uk? I wonder why wouldn't Amazon's backend just figure it automatically and just ship locally anyway.

Free freight is often on offer, but the real issue is that you don't need to pay import duty.

You don't need to pay import duty on books imported into the UK because they're exempt (and zero-rated for VAT). It's solely a matter of shipping costs.

Might be for Britain, but that is not the case for the rest of Europe - who also use amazon.co.uk.

Not just that, but the product selection is different. For instance, I cannot buy my Joachim Witt CDs from amazon.com, I have to order from .de. I could not order some products from .ca and needed to use.com.

Granted, I haven't used amazon in about 3 years, they may have improved their global database system.

I spent a good deal of effort on the issue of Amazon locales for my book web app. There are quite a few reasons for this:

* Some books will exist in one locale but not in others;

* Some books will be in stock in a locale but not in others;

* Some books will have a different cover and/or slightly different edition if it's a UK or USA version;

* If you are buying the Kindle version, availability varies by country, but only UK residents can buy from the UK Kindle store.

* If you buy many books from the States and you live in the UK, you'll end up paying hefty import charges.

* Delivery from your closest Amazon is usually faster (provided the books are in stock) and free (or cheaper for expedite shipment).

If you go to the Staff Picks of the Week section of my site (http://anynewbooks.com/staff-picks/), you'll notice how under each book I'm forced to place up to 5 links (US, Canada, UK, Kindle international, UK Kindle). It may be slightly confusing, but in my experience international readers appreciate the effort (the rest of the world is quite sick of US only web apps to be frank).

Removed (redundant).

Saw just after posting that a good few other people already offered the same information.

Did you mean to reply to me with this comment?

I originally posted that I thought books were exempt from charges, but then saw someone right below had already said (and with more certainty than me!).

Sorry, probably should have either left it there or deleted it entirely.

Oh OK, no worries. My comment went from many upvotes to several downvotes, because people assumed that you were saying that my information was redundant and should be removed. We got to experience a bit of a hive-mind on HN. :)

One other reason to be make sure you cover locales properly, from the developer's point of view, is that you need separate Associates accounts for the different locales.

If you refer someone to the UK store then they eventually end up on the US store to buy then you won't get the sale (afaik).

I don't think .com will even ship to .ca (unless it's changed recently).

Why they don't merge it all? No idea, but I'd guess media owners have different locale ownership structures so they only acquire distributions rights for an X-based company shipping to customers-in-X, and so on.

I live in Canada and I've ordered from amazon.com for many years, 2001 is the earliest I could find.

Having said that, I only have ordered books from amazon.com, perhaps you are referring to ordering something else beause amazon.com has shipped to Canada for atleast the past 9 years.

Please don't just detect, just allow selection. I always browse .com first because it has the most reviews. Tech books often have 0 reviews on .co.uk (which is idiotic but Amazon treats its different sites as entirely separate entities).

Nice start and a good reaction to the information overload of book recommendation threads :)

A few comments:

- Zooming on image covers seems pointless to me (is it just me?)

- I'd like to see some kind of indicator of usefulness/relevance of books (books 1 person recommended vs books that crop up in every single thread), whether you just open it up to upvoting and downvoting, pull in review data, or get more complex

- One step further, crowdsource book summaries - let a contributor submit 'cliff's notes' for a book rather than just a review.

Very clever idea. If you are looking for a complimentary service to discover new books, you could signup with my site http://anynewbooks.com, and select categories like Programming or Business and Investing. The latter is one of my favorite categories, because there are always great new titles for it. (Warning for the tech crowd: you will receive one weekly email per category you pick, so don't go crazy. :))

Well executed. There are a lot of books on the list I'd never heard of, but look interesting.

Also, nice monetisation idea, jacquesm!

Do you intend to use this site for profit (nothing wrong with that..) or have some ideas to promote "hacker culture" with the monies.

It isn't mine, it's DanielBMarkham's site.

Is there any reason the links to books use javascript instead of a regular anchor?

This is my question as well. I do wish I could ctrl-click or mousewheel-click to open up a new tab with the link. Also an indication that "e-book" is an amazon link to the kindle version. I (naively, of course) thought there were free e-book links there! Like for SICP or the like. (Totally fine there's not, I readily acknowledge it was a naive hope :)

The strange thing is the URL is the onclick handler on an anchor link. If you're doing to track outbound analytics, Google has information on how to do this in a better way http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

PS. I do like the site.

To mask the affiliate links perhaps.

That was my thought. And if it's correct, it's not worth it given the aff link is visible at the Amazon page, and if there was ever a crowd that would know to check for it, this is it.

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the aff links. Profit is fun.

Very nice idea!

I would also like to see links back to collections of the discussion pages - maybe scraped and organized automatically?

I might be biased since I've been reading these books now, but I think there should be more Lisp books. It might not be strictly correct to put On Lisp, SICP, and Paradigms of AI Programming in "functional programming" (although I am not sure about a JQuery book in that category) but there are a few threads in the HN archives with solid discussion on Lisp books so I think they do deserve a place somewhere.

Nice site Daniel, any chance of some RSS feeds or an API?, I'd love to integrate this with http://hackernewsers.com/books.html

excellent idea. i'd love to be able to sort by format and price, though. rather than voting to select personal preference, how about having order-able lists that i can share?

Don't know if you saw this or not, but the lists are orderable and sharable now -- as you make changes, the link changes at the top. Just copy the link for whatever settings you like.

Needs to have format and price, though. Right now it's only sortable by experience level and question.

No SICP?

Also, Javascript: The Good Parts is duplicated.

Great site, a successor to the defunct Programming-Books.com. /bookmarked.

Question: What's the source of your book info?

Wow, that BIOS book is a great find. Thanks!

I thought so, too, until I saw that it's selling for $679. Then I saw that your account was created an hour ago so I wonder if you're being sarcastic.

Wonderful! I've been looking for a resource like this for a while. Many blog posts, but nothing like this.

Thanks for doing this. Just a point about the site itself: scrolling seems to lock up while items are loading (which it does for some time). Maybe you could make it less aggressive with the async loading of items (load a few, load more when I get to the bottom)?

Just wondering why you chose to require JavaScript for this site? It strikes me that it would have been just as easy to write it without any JavaScript, but then adding a small amount of client side JS for client side sorting when JS is available?

There is going to be a lot of books in there, so _filtering_ is a must, sorting just isn't enough.

EDIT: I mean this for "Noob ... Expert" selection. Also simple tags would probably be better than those "How to xx some xx"

I really like it. One suggestion: changing the "How to" section to radios so I don't select two at once. As far as I can tell, any two "How to"s result in zero result.

The combinations work, although not as much as I'd like

For instance, here's the list of books about how to tell people about your business and run a killer startup, for folks who already know a bit:

http://hn-books.com/#1=Q1V1&10=Q10V0&11=Q11V0&12...

Was this an off shoot of a previous Show HN?

I remember a similar concept based around topics within books, but I've not been able to find it again.

Yes, it was. Daniel's been busy :)

You don't happen to have a link do you?

It should be noted that this is a great way for the site owner/creator to make commissions on each purchase through the provided links.

hi nice site, please consider having a table view that have the following columns: Book Title, Author, Publication Date (make the table sortable by any row)

And if I click the table row, it can expand to the long descriptions and cover shot you added to each book. What first at attracts me to a book is the title, author and how recent it is!

please implement pagination. Firefox froze for a few seconds while rendering your page.

There were a few threads on non programming books too. You could add them to that list.

It would be great to be able to see the HN comments about a book, and who made them.

JavaScript: The Good Parts has a duplicate!!

UPDATE: many books are duplicated.

Feature request: Ability to see only books that have an e-book version available.

Amen. Almost any time anyone recommends a book on here, I immediately go for the eBook on Amazon for my Kindle app on my iPhone/iPad. The most annoying thing about Steve Blank's book was the fact that there's no electronic version. For me, that's almost always a deal-breaker.

Are you violating any copyright laws because you're using Amazon's images?

I'm pretty sure that's allowed. Amazon has a really nice xml interface designed to make it easy for you to sell books for amazon.com. I'm fairly certain that they provide photos for the same reason.

Well done. I have one request: The ability to filter by language

Not reachable at 23.37 EST

Hey it would be nice to add a discussions/comments page. Of course we can have the discussions here on HN but the site will keep it active for much more time.

clickable: http://hn-books.com

Is the link in the submission not clickable for you ?

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