Show HN: Create a 3D book cover and embed it on your website | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Create a 3D book cover and embed it on your website

3dbook.xyz

78 pointsscastiel19 comments

Hi, Sebastien here, creator of this side project :)

A little context about the creation of the app:

It all started in July when, for the book I just started writing, I created a web app that generates the HTML and CSS to embed a 3D book cover on a website. I posted it here on HackerNews, and, big surprise, it was a huge success! It stayed #1 for the whole day and brought me a lot of useful feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896856

From that day, I kept in my mind to create an application to enable people to create a 3D Cover and embed it without caring about the HTML and CSS, just by copying and pasting a small code snippet wherever they want.

I developed it using tools I already knew, using cloud services when possible, because my goal was to release as soon as possible.

A small overview of the tech stack:

- Node.js/Express for the webserver

- Heroku to host the webserver

- MongoDB Atlas for the database

- React, only for the 3D cover editor

- Auth0 for the authentication

- Cloudinary to host images

- Stripe to handle premium account purchase

What do you think?

Isn't all that really expensive for hosting a small bit of javascript and a few images (all of which could be linked into 1 single request) ?

I guess I'm saying I'd love to hear a bit about what the hosting + running costs of such a solution are.

For now the costs are very low, only the domain name and $5 for Heroku. The rest is free, and should remain until I have huge traffic.

But I agree with you, a more optimized architecture could be more scalable, this will be for a second version ;)

congrats on launching! tracked your Netlify tool since the previous show hn. since launching my book I realized the need for a beautiful book image haha. I now have a directory of device mock tools https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#dev... and you're in there

Very cool, thanks :)

I love it! Used it to make the book shown on my site https://tiny.mba

Also cool, I use it in a browser overlay when I do livestreaming with OBS! Once I realized I could embed HTML/CSS in the stream I was able to copy/paste this right into the overlay. So easy.

Very cool Alex, glad you like it :)

Nice job! This is really slick. Have you considered other pricing models? One approach that comes to mind:

- Allow the user to use the full tool without ever having to sign-up. - Charge $3-5 for them to download it. Sign-up optional. - To prevent them from screenshotting it without paying, add a watermark that only gets removed once they've paid for the download.

I remember seeing a resume generator on HN many years ago that used this model (i.e. no sign up required/pay upon download), and I thought it was clever: 1) it breaks down the barrier to use that the sign up causes; 2) it gets people bought-in/proud of their beautiful cover and thus more likely to pay; 3) allows you to monetize one-time users. Meanwhile, you could also keep the monthly subscription for people who expect to use it a lot (designers, agencies, etc).

This is very good advice! Indeed I’m thinking a lot about the pricing model, decided to keep it simple for now, but it will depend on the features I add.

Thanks for the suggestions, I keep them in my mind :)

A few months ago, the author posted the initial Show HN which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896856

It's an impressive animation, and I hope you make some money on it. I personally would just steal your style tag and the book div/img tag and call it a day if I wanted to use it, so I hope your customer base doesn't have front-end web experience. You should try reaching out to book publishers with eCommerce sites. That would be great on some product detail pages.

Or you can go to my previous generator and generate the HTML and CSS, or even find there the tutorial to create the animation yourself: https://3d-book-css.netlify.app ;)

My view is the animation itself is not what I sell, it is more the ease of use, with the image hosting. The pricing model probably still needs a lot of thinking :)

Is there an example or demo? The home page appears to be just text and no images.

Right there in the middle of the page. Have you got JS disabled or an overzealous ad blocker?

I had the same problem – turns out there is a javascript error on the page in Safari: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: book. Still fails with adblocker disabled.

I’ll have a look right now, sorry for the inconvenience.

This is fucking awesome!

As an author I can tell you, it’s annoying to try to get 3D mockups of your books. I usually hire someone on Fiverr, but the results are inconsistent.

So glad this exists now. I’ll use it for the book I launched this week!

It reminds me of an app in the 90's that did exactly the same but with software boxes (at the time, software came in very fancy book-size boxes). I think the name was Alexa, actually. Am I the only one remembering this?

Requires an account. I'll pass.

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