Show HN: Zeneca – Share and discuss your favorite books
zeneca.io
zeneca.io
1) Privacy / Monetization: We're big believers that users should own their own data. We have no plans to sell your data to anyone. In terms of monetization, there are several approaches. We can add affiliate links to all books on bookshelves. We can build a freemium model. We can have authors promote books. The list goes on. For now we aren't focusing on monetization -- but rather focusing on building an awesome product that gives people what they actually want :)
2) Source of data. For now we are using Google Books api!
3) Thanks for the feedback re: ordering. We'll keep this mind and think about how we can improve our search results.
Once I signed in, I got this paragraph on my profile:
> Welcome to your Library! Once you start creating bookshelves and adding books, they will show up here! Until then here's some helpful information on how to build your library. From the library edit page you can create bookshelves and add books.
"library edit page" is a link to https://www.zeneca.io/edit -- which is a 404.
Some comments/requests/suggestions (from a goodreads user):
* For me the main benefit of goodreads is their book suggestions. From what I can tell it's pretty naive but being able to see suggestions that I might enjoy based on my reading history, and also being able to see suggested books based on a single book or author is amazing.
* Read dates (and support for multiple read throughs) would be important to make the move from goodreads.
* Shelfs are nice but it's not clear what they are meant to be used for. I probably would create shelfs for the different genres I read, but then I'm missing a way to split the books in want-to-read/read/reading/gave-up.
* The shelf ui is pretty but not very useful. An option for a grid with filters or search would be nice.
* A good API would be AMAZING. More than amazing actually.
* Monetisation wise, affiliate link to amazon should be a good first way to keep you interested in improving zeneca. I'd say just add it.
* Public roadmap would be great with a way to subscribe for monthly feature updates or something.
["^ ","~:shelves",[["^ ","~:desc","","~:name","Science Fiction","~:books",[["^ ","~:id", ...
edit: apparently this is "transit JSON" https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format
Would love to learn more about tracking re-reads. Do you have an ideal ux in mind?
Linkable book shelves: Noting this! We'll prioritize Description for a book: Right now, there's a kind of hack you can do: if you write a "thought" about a book, it will show up on your book page too. We're thinking about some kind of "pin a thought as a description" feature -- that should be on it's way too!
Here's to iterating : )
I was trying to create a bookshelf with a bunch of books I liked. I have a strong aversion to manual work, and didn't want to continue after a few books because it took multiple seconds to add a book. In case you are interested in users like me this might help:
- Allow selecting multiple books in 1 search results - Don't show books that are already in the shelf in the search results - Make the search prompt blazing fast so that there is no waiting between multiple books - This is a bit far fetched but if I could enter a list of books and the best matching results would be added automatically that would be very cool
Also I think something goes wrong if you change the name of 1 shelf into a name which is already the name of another shelf. (I was adding books to the wrong shelf and wanted to switch the names, I think the shelves got linked somehow)
re: improve speed -- great ideas. Will note and see what we can do!
re: renaming shelf getting linked -- uhoh, sounds like a bug -- will look into this!.
<rant> I'm not going to give you MY content, for free, if you don't AT LEAST allow for my content, and the content of my peers on your website, to be in a format which is easy to export and edit.
You know why?
Because in a couple of years you will raise more money, and your VC will tell you that a subscription business is a great idea, you will follow him, and I will need to decide between paying you $X per month, or stop using the service. I don't want to get there again.
</rant>
Nothing against you personally. But perhaps there's a way to promise potential customers that you're not going to screw them eventually.
Edit: to be clear, a "format which is easy to export and edit" means two things: something like markdown, and a single button which allows me to download everything I ever wrote on your website.
This is why I generally only use things online that I can pay for, these days. It tends to ensure some degree of longer term service.
For what it's worth -- we definitely plan on making it easy to export and delete your data. While this feature is on the way, you can always ping us, and we can send you a data structure of your data, or delete it.
- you'd let users easily export and delete their data/account - that you'd give users time to export their data in an easily readable format and also delete their account (with assurance that data will actually be deleted), if you are planning something that might change these possibilities -- a sale, a VC thingie - you'd give this option in the UI/app itself and not via an email or support request
Till then, I'd either not use the service or just use as a parasite.
Bitter experiences and all that.
--
I like the font. However, the UI feels more like a blog, and it's not intuitive to me what I want to do with it.
UX is clunky on Firefox with default uBlockOrigin turned on. And yes, no way to delete the account. Well..
There is a website that has the same function, but for movies. Apologies I cannot remember the name. Similar funciton. You record the titles of the movies you watched.
Thinking about this again (and this is why in my other comment I ask "who pays for this/how is that paid for"; this would be goldmine for Amazon, B&N, and other players.
We also know that "FBI checking out Americans' reading habits / Bookstores, libraries can't do much to fend off search warrants" (https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/FBI-checking-out-Ame...)
No more needs for warrants!! :)
We're Joe & Stopa, from https://zeneca.io. We're building the successor to Goodreads. For now, you can create public bookshelves (i.e https://zeneca.io/stopa), discover like-minded readers, and share your favorite quotes and thoughts (i.e here's all I learned from PG: https://www.zeneca.io/stopa/details/shycAgAAQBAJ)
We left our jobs in June last year to build a company together (but we didn’t have an idea… yet!). Since then we’ve shipped several projects. Our criteria for each project was 1) it had to be something we wanted for ourselves and 2) each project had to be more ambitious than the previous.
One day, Joe said that he wanted to share his favorite books online, but found most places did not do this in an elegant way. We noticed that the people we admired used plain lists on their personal websites, rather than Goodreads.
So we thought, hey, surely this can’t be the best way to do things. Maybe there’s a space here to fill what’s missing. From there, we built a static version of the site, and shared it with our friends: https://zeneca.io/joe + https://zeneca.io/stopa
This got enough interest, that we coded up the backend, so anyone could create public book pages. So far, 300 people have created their own public book pages.
Once book pages were in, more ideas start to sprout. We try to discuss books all over the place: from twitter comments to sparse reddit groups. What if there was a place just for this? You could find like-minded readers, have deeper discussions, and save all those conversations. When you wanted to share a book with a friend, they'd be able to "see" your experience of going through it.
To support that, we introduced quotes and thoughts. You can write thoughts about your favorite books, and they'll show up on your public page. Others can send you super cute hearts.
This is still very rough. We want to hack together more features, that can help you really engage with books. One thing we hope, is to siphon time off of Twitter and FB, and move it to something much more enriching: discussing and exploring favorite books.
Please try it out, we'd appreciate your feedback : )
---
For the technically curious, the site was all built in Clojure. It's been a joy to use. One surprise for us, was just how powerful Postgres is. Coming from big companies, it's easy to move towards more complicated setups -- however Postgres does a phenomenal job of helping you handle a few users without getting in your way, and going much further.
Some general thoughts:
- Moving over my shelves is an undertaking that'll probably take more than 30-40 minutes. Before I do that, I'd like the know about the privacy policy you folks intend to put in place.
- On a similar note, potential monetization is also something which worries me because many-a-times monetization comes at the cost of compromising on my privacy.
- I'd also like to know if exporting the data would be possible down the line.
Some UI, UX thoughts:
1. On the https://www.zeneca.io/library page, there are too many fonts, too many font sizes going on. Explicitly, there is (i) different font size, (AND SPACING!) for "Go to published library" (12.8 px), (ii) another font size for "Change your avatar" (0.9 em) , (iii) another one (understandable, in this case) for my name (1.3 em), (iv) another size for intro (16 px), (v) another for shelf description (1.1 em), (vi) another for shelf name (1.5 em) and (vii) another (18.72 px) for fin. That's too many font sizes. I strongly recommend sticking to three, or four. I would also recommend to fix the spacing on "go to published library".
2. On a similar note, I'm thinking if the avatars could be generated using Spectral (the font used elsewhere), instead of a sans-serif font which looks terribly out of place on the page. Consider using something with a bunch of ligatures ;)
3. On the main page (`/explore`), in the text "Got feedback? Let us know on twitter", you've also italicized the emoji. In my opinion, that looks unnatural, and you're probably better off italicizing just the text.
4. On the same page, avatars (in the left sidebar) have shadows, but that's the only place avatars have shadows. They're not shadowed (is that a word?) on the `/library` page, or the published page.
5. Minor suggestion: There is no way of navigating to the list-of-blog-posts page from the Getting Started Blogpost. There's actually no way of getting there at all since https://www.zeneca.io/blog/ returns a 404 page. This is a bit unusual since the Getting started page is at https://www.zeneca.io/blog/getting-started.
(edit) 6. On the published page, the tabs are presented weirdly. It could be that I'm mistaken but in my understanding of tabs, the active one is usually in bold font, black color. The inactive ones are the ones painted blue indicating that they can be clicked upon to navigate to them. In your case, on https://www.zeneca.io/<username>, the default, and active tab - "Library" is colored blue, and "Timeline" is colored black. This suggests that I'm on the timeline tab, and can click on library to go to it, when in fact just the opposite is true.
PS: I love the box shadow on the shelves ;)
I understand that this is a very early version of the site. Kudos for having some working thing. My suggestions above are in no way a criticism of the idea. I sure hope you folks whip up a much needed replacement to Goodreads. Godspeed.
Privacy Policy: Hear you loud and clear. We'll prioritize this
Monetization: Both of us believe users should own their data, and we would reject any monetization that would involve selling data. There are some paths we're considering (freemium, community memberships, working with authors), but our first priority, is to make something people actually use.
Export: Heck yeah. We'll prioritize this. In the meantime, if you need to export data, send a ping and we'll do it manually
1) - 5) We'll fast follow on all of these -- excellent points!
Gratitude again, can't wait to iterate.
You mention: "We noticed that the people we admired used plain lists on their personal websites"
Any way to collect book reccomendations from public sources and preload it? I imagine this maybe some manual work but the utility will be great.
For e.g.: Gates - https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-202... Collision : https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf Andreessen - https://www.goodbooks.io/people/marc-andreessen
Btw - I just noticed while googling that this may be what GoodBooks.io is attempting
Definitely think there's something to this. Perhaps even people historically -- for example, I'd be very curious about Victor Hugo's favorite books, etc
We'll consider going deeper on this.
1) are you planning to introduce passwords?
2) what are your thoughts on adding privacy settings?
2a) perhaps I want my account to be visible to only a few people, and not to everyone
2b) perhaps I like reading 'naughty' books that I don't want visible to everyone, but only selected people
3) any chance you can have a (simple comment section a-la HN) where we can 'debate'/argue/comment/discuss a book? (as you mentioned)
EDIT:
1) Who is paying for all that?
2) Add a privacy policy please (with the right content), and how are you treating GDPR?
1) Initially we went with magic links because we thought that would be a better UX. It's been surprising and amusing to see how much feedback we get on this. We hear you loud and clear and will budget some time to move auth from magic links to passwords / o-auth
2) Privacy settings make sense! We'll be baking this in the near future :)
3) Comments and discussion are coming soon!
In terms of paying -- Stopa and I are both running on our savings for now :) Our main focus is to build something awesome that we ourselves love and other people want. Assuming we succeed at that, when the time for monetization comes we will never sell user data (this is a first principle for us).
Prior to this Show HN we hadn't gotten any feedback re: adding a privacy policy -- we hear you loud and clear and will add that in. For GDPR, we are big believers that users should own their own data and will build out data export and account deletion features in the future.
One thought I had (disclaimer: I am not looking for a date!!!!)(for now!). I also see this as an opportunity to "meet like-minded people in your area". I remember back in the day where ICQ had a 'search' mode. Imagine I can pick 10 books that someone (m/f/...) has read in my area. I am not suggesting your make this a dating site, but for introverts/avid readers it wouldn't surprise me if people would be paying attention to that.
Perhaps a setting that would add the location "Henry" versus "Henry (London, UK)". Feel free to add this on the "never do" list :)
Is there an email address to send feedback to? I don't use Twitter.
(Jokes aside, indeed, something we'll have to figure out soon)