Ask HN: Any interest in a startup book review site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any interest in a startup book review site?

7 pointsprassarkar8 comments

(Treat this as a customer discovery phase)

After searching for some non-trivial amount of time I have yet to find a good review site/blog that caters to books of interest to the start up community. Since we're always strapped for time, I wonder whether it would help to create a site that would serve as a hub for these book reviews.

The core value here isn't just the reviews themselves but other related resources - TED talks, slides, HN discussion threads, case studies, links to "I used the advice in this book and this was my experience" articles, etc.

A peripheral value here is this site/blog would be indexed, categorized and of course searchable.

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http://hn-books.com is on the same lines.

Thanks, I hadn't come across that in my search.

That site seems to solve the problem of finding book recommendations in a way that's easily filtered/sorted. I like the fact that it lists additional versions (ebook, pdf, etc.) of the book.

My thoughts were that the community might want to read reviews from a startup-oriented individual rather than the default synopsis from the book's publisher. I also imagined that multiple reviewers could review the same book (either on the hub site or their own blog).

DanielBMarkham, who runs hn books does write reviews as well. Letting users review would probably be a nice addition.

Since you are going down the lean path, presumably you want to make money from this. How will you do that?

I wasn't exactly looking to make it a business but enough money to cover operational costs. The revenue could be a mix of affiliate links + Adsense (kept to a minimal).

The focus here is to create a community-focused treasure trove of startup knowledge rather than a page-view focused content site.

http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/learning-python-3rd-edition/...

http://bibliotechnical.com/books/learning-python

I made the latter; the problem I ran into was generating quality reviews and related information. I found it was going to take a lot of manual curation to get good results.

HN is also a tough crowd for this kind of project, I think you would be more profitable trying to optimize for people searching for 'java book' instead of those looking for the 'best java book given that I know how to program and know these other languages'.

http://www.goodreads.com/ already exists. It simply lacks a strong HN-focused community. As others pointed out, we also have hn-books.com.

We already have hn-books.com and, IIRC, at least one competitor.

The transparent commerciality (bit.ly -> Amazon affiliate links) turns me off, but others may think otherwise.

Yeah, not sure why people have objection to this. It's not like they are affected. Sure, it reveals a motivation that otherwise might not be there, but everyone has hidden motivations.

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