Show HN: Shepherd.com – Discover books in a new way, like wandering a bookstore

I'm sick of everything I can buy on the internet being presented as a grid of images with a title, description, and price, with a detail page if I click on it.

The presentation of a physical stores is so varied! A small bookstore is so different from a large bookstore, which is so different from a toy-store, which is again so different from an auto-parts store.

I think the online UX for shopping is in dire need of iteration at this point. There's a reason each of those physical stores are presented differently, and I feel like we've lost so much of that in online shopping.

I'm really excited to see the ideas you come up with for ways to make buying books online different from buying shoes or auto-parts online. I hope you're able to find some of that magic that bookstores were able to create.

Good luck!

Eg: they have lists on books about Indonesia, about biographies of Charlemagne, about understanding Modern Greece, etc.

However, you’d probably need more than spines. One of the things about being in a store, is the ability to pull the book out, and look into it; maybe even ask questions of the staff.

But, yep this is a great idea. And you could probably do it from a video walking down those aisles - and present it via a VR or AR technique.

I think it would be a lot of work for book store owners however because along with taking pictures they would also need to fill in some metadata as well about the book to make any kind of searching/categorizing possible. Maybe an intrepid entrepreneur could start with a few bookstores and do that categorization for them as a "do things that don't scale" experiment.

Great idea!

How would you identify the other side / challenges to that book list?

This is something I am thinking about a lot as I want to combat social media who serves up the same worldview to people without challenging it. Here is a preview screenshot of the related book list feature I plan to add to every list next month too: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists

Please let me know what you think and if you want to take this to email I am at ben@shepherd.com.

"All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation."

[0]: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/1/31/lists-are-...

I'd wager this right there is the problem.

Sounds like you're reading through books like they are a chore. Instead, find one book with a subject/theme that interests you (so the subject itself is not boring) and then try to relax and read slowly.

If it's fiction, savor every word and phrase, try to visualise the description/emotion/action. If it's non-fiction, think through what what you just read means, why is that's so (it's okay to not have answers, questions are important).

I know "try to relax" is unhelpful. But one approach I'd try is to carve out a block of time (say, 1hr), put your phone/devices on Do Not Disturb, set an alarm for one hour (so you don't think too much time's slipping away) and just read.

It's purely anecdotal, but both me and a couple of friends commented on how consuming short content (eg. youtube videos, short blog posts) led to "attention atrophy". If the content doesn't "get to the point" immediately, we get anxious and bored.

If this describes you as well, try consuming less short-form and more long-form content (longer videos, longer in-depth articles, etc).

Most self-help books do; not most books. I’m using that term in a broad sense to encompass books which explore one major “life-changing”/“perspective-shifting” idea, like any by Cal Newport or Simon Sinek.

Those books have little substance. They’re pamphlets padded by examples supporting the one thesis. Find an online talk by the author and you’ll get 90% of the juice without spending a penny and by a fraction of the time investment of the book.

Buy a dumbphone, strictly restrict access to the internet via computer. Wait a year to regrow your abilities.

Sorry to sound like your dad.

Eventually what I realized was that these books were actually stimulating my thoughts at a higher frequency than the author intended. This is only really a bad thing if you need to get through the book under a certain deadline. Stimulating new thoughts is precisely why I read books in the first place!

These days, when some sentence sends me on a mental rabbit trail and then consciously pause and follow it as far as I like before returning to the text. Overall this is a much more satisfying reading experience for me.

I am working to add Topics which I am calling Shelves toward July/August to expand the experience and get closer to what I hope to achieve.

Here is a really rough preview of part of that: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages

Please keep in mind that is a very early mockup and I am currently redoing it heavily. But the idea is to recommend books one by one to start, as well as better ways to view them (ignore the bottom of the mockup as that is all being redone).

The back of the book jacket costs about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to license, so I can't do that yet. But down the road I might look at that. For now people can click through to the store to see that too.

Getting a randomized "book feed" is not the same as randomly wandering in a bookstore.

I miss wandering around putting random things in a trolley.

This only works in the small shops where the people there live for books, not in the big chain stores where they just work.

What you are describing sounds pretty cool though. I'd only add 2 things:

First, for non-fiction books, an inside preview is a must for me (e.g. for recipe books).

Second, I want the same kind of quantity of books you'd find in a book shop - one of the things that makes it hard to find books on the likes of Amazon is just how many there are. A curated library of books would be preferable.

But I have to agree, expecting a bookstore and then getting something totally other is too much of a clash. If you want a bookstore, nothing's going to beat a bookstore. If this site offers something different, it should be sold on its merits.

The Internet Archive Open Library is good, and Z-library.

Also:

https://bigbooksearch.com/

http://bookcoverarchive.com/

Also I know it goes without saying but goodreads lists are great for this sort of thing too.

I have a 4-year-old so trying to figure out how to make this work for children's book is high on my list (I am hoping to ship a full Children's and YA section toward the Fall 2021). I did try a round of emailing teachers to see if they would be interested in recommending books but that didn't work. I am running tests now with children's authors to see how well that works. And, I am hoping toward the end of the year to use the Ingram API to show age recommendations on books and sort it so you can find books for specific ages (i want this too)...

Personally, I spend a lot of time on Amazon reviews to try to sort through and find good kids books. I still get a fair number of duds there that we give away.

My son is 4 and his favorites right now is the dory fantasmagory series. Some others he loves are big blue truck, snail and the whale (great book and all their books are amazing), gruffalo, mixed up chameleon, the tiger who came to tea, good day good night, Lion Inside (all their books are good), here we are (ditto for his books), the darkest dark (by astronaut), and Giraffes can't dance.

Elephant and Piggie (Mo Willems) are great, they have simple pictures and large, short colourful text mostly in word bubbles, and the stories are quite fun and tend to have plot twists (children love surprises). Highly recommended.

We also had a lot of success with good old Dr. Seuss classics, though those will take a bit longer as they are more complex (though this should give you an idea of how simple Elephant and Piggie are heh)

[1] Within reason.

Great idea! I'd love to do author readings/events. I am hoping I can start peeking at what that would require later this summer. I felt like they would be ghost towns if I didn't have a way to get them in front of the right traffic/readers. I am aiming to ship true topic pages this summer and I felt like then I can show events to people who might be interested.

For example, I recently attended a paid online talk by an author called Guy Walters on the real life Great Escape During WW2 (https://www.crowdcast.io/guywalters - he does these talks often and they are awesome). I felt like I couldn't effective promote it unless I have a topic page about World War 2 to gather signups.

What do you think?

How would you connect raw traffic to events they are interested in?

I’m also impressed by the speed of the site. Well done!

One thing book stores have is gifts for people. “Someone who wants a book about dream interpretation may enjoy a rare minerals Rubin’s cube” may be a good way to increase your average referral fee.

And don’t forget cards and stationary!

You’ve got the layout down. Now I want to see more of the other items I see when browsing a bookstore!

The Best Books On Parthia And The War with Rome In The 1st Century BCE https://shepherd.com/best-books/parthia-and-war-rome-1st-cen...

These book recommendations are all recommended by experts in those fields and they they pick those with no input from us.

And, just me on the project.

This is a FT project for me (and a huge passion project as well). I am lucky in that I have had several business exits and I can afford to work on this without worrying about the money. That said, I need to eventually build a business around it because I do have costs for the amazing developer I work with, the amazing designer, and a few PT people that help with data entry. And, I'd like to accelerate development with the money the site generates.

For the next 3 years my focus is on growing the content, features, and traffic.

In the short term I have affiliate links to Amazon and Bookshop.org. I am not sure that will be enough to create a sustainable business but I should have more data within 3 to 6 months to know how that is going to play out.

I have some crazier/wild ideas I want to try eventually, but those require a lot more traffic. For example, I'd like to try putting a book ad in between books 4 and 5 on every book recommendation page, and see if that is a good model (the idea being like Google PPC to do book ads on specific topics and thus a higher CTR / interest from readers). I'd like to find ways to help authors make more while I also am making more. Such as autographed book sales, selling posters/art related to books and trying to monetize some of their IP more, and so on.

I am also playing with the idea of doing a Kick Starter or similar where I match what readers give to help get this going a little faster and giving a group VIP status within the site.

Thoughts?

Preview of that feature here: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists