Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads

booqsi.com

478 pointsjustinberding187 comments

Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember.

Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting.

So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph.

We also felt like it was important for Booqsi to be independent of Amazon; we care about supporting local bookstores, so every book in Booqsi links you to Bookshop.org to purchase that book (not Amazon).

Here are some of my favorite features launched as part of beta:

- A book-focused social feed (finally!)

- Beautifully-rendered custom bookshelves to show off to your friends

- Streamlined book recommendations to friends

- Easily track reading goals and books you've read

And many more...

It's completely free and easy to use, and we would love your feedback as you explore the platform.

Open articleView on HN

I once was part of a now-defunct reading forum in my teens.

On the forum, people would package three related books into quests. A boring example would be a dystopian quest pack with three books about three very different dystopian scenarios.

But the quests people put together were usually more interesting. I remember a "Weird Magic" quest had books with really unconventional magic systems. I found Motherless Brooklyn (detective with Tourette's) in a quest pack of "heroes with issues". Other quest ideas would be evil protagonists, alien first-contact with the wrong guy, and stuff like that. You can often find three books for even the goofiest of quests.

It was a cool way to find new books. And whenever you didn't know what to read next, you'd look at what quests you were still working on and choose among them. Once finished, your completed quest count would increase.

Long append-only lists of genre-related books were never as interesting to me. Quests only having three books made them a fun thing to collect. Maybe there's something fun there that new goodreads competitors can experiment with.

Oh this is so neat!! Thanks for the idea

Anyone want this? Can have it up in March

Lmk if you want contributors, I was looking at building something like this as well.

Hey! Sure thing!

Google form for email! https://forms.gle/myqMroFy2nAJR4YY6 Discord where we can collaborate on it - https://discord.gg/ZwJxNtnKza thanks!

Hey, would love to connect. I'm actually building a community app for book readers as well that helps with book discovery and connecting readers.

Here's my email: booksforthewise@yahoo.com

Our Instagram where we're building our community (over 50k+ book readers) instagram.com/booksforthewise

-Jeff

Can we add a podcast angle to this? Hmu of you want contribution

Yes

I'd be curious about this too. where can I signup to get a notification?

Google form for email! https://forms.gle/myqMroFy2nAJR4YY6 Discord where you can watch it get built - https://discord.gg/ZwJxNtnKza

thanks!

Sure, I'd be interested.

I'm in, let me know when ready

It's hard to imagine ideas like this living as a stand-alone idea rather than a feature in a more general book-tracking platform.

Maybe I'm just uncreative, or maybe I'm too tempted to always generalize everything, but it seems like as soon as you implement a user log-in system for any sort of interactivity, you would then be tempted to import a book dump into your database, and the next thing you know you're now a Goodreads, Storygraph, Librarything, Booqsi, Bookwyrm, Booksloth, Oku.club, etc. competitor.

After all, most of the magic was in the community users creating and sharing fun quests and the natural curating effect of being able to sort by the most popular quests. And as you can imagine, most quests were generic and bad. "chuck123's sci-fi quest"

It was also fun to see how many quests you started by completing a single quest. Due to overlap, you'd be one book away of completing other quests, usually a book you would have never read otherwise which was part of the fun, and then you'd be another book away from finishing even more quests.

Too bad Goodreads' API is dead, else you could at least build interesting things on top of a "Login with Goodreads" button without recreating an entire platform. Kind of like how health apps on iOS get read/write access to HealthKit instead of all of them building their own pedometer and asking you to constantly reenter and update your data.

I imagine this sort of Quest thing could also be used to incentivize reading, ala the BookSmart program (personal pan pizzas as a reward worked quite well when I was younger). Or to otherwise gamify reading. Or... it could be a mess of trying to tie points to yet another social media account.

Sounds fun!

This sounds amazing.

I'm making this, but for podcasts!

Can you please throw more info on what you are building? Have you written / tweeted about it anytime?

Havent posted publically just yet.. I couldn't find any good podcast exploration platforms or tools. Things like moonbeam are too random and things like subreddits either too inactive or too based on human recs and have a cold start problem. Its a real PITA finding good podcasts. So i figured I'll build a thing for it. The intention is to have something like a book club and what parent was saying for podcasts.

Check out Fathom. https://hello.fathom.fm/

Pretty cool, thanks for sharing! I took a cursory look, but this seems to miss the community element like the grandparent mentions, would make my project kinda redundant if they did though

Awesome, let's connect. I'm actually building a community app for book readers as well that helps with book discovery and connecting readers. Would love to see what we can do together.

Here's my email: booksforthewise@yahoo.com

And our Instagram where we're building our community (over 50k+ book readers) instagram.com/booksforthewise

-Jeff

Love this idea. Gamification of reading is something people have dabbled with for awhile; would be great to eventually build in something like you mentioned.

This is a great idea. I often go on a month-long tangent of related books, films, podcasts and articles. Currently it's the space race and the war in Afghanistan. It would be cool to have "an introduction to _____" lists for this.

Are you familiar with shepherd.com ? It's a site with short curated lists on just about any topic. It's still in beta, so growing

That's a really fun and interesting concept! The way that quest names can be more specific than broad genres while still encompassing several books is great, because you kind of know what you're getting into without giving away the whole book. "Weird Magic" makes me want to look deeper immediately because that alone is a great hook. (If you happen to recall what the Weird Magic books were, I'd love to know!)

This exact thing happens on r/suggestmeabook, but I'm not sure it happens that often.

This is great but I'm not going to sign up just to see what the site looks like. There's no reason for a large part of the functionality (book info, ratings, reviews) to be behind a login wall. As it stands right now Goodreads is a lot more open.

This 100%, if you can't show me your site/app without collecting my personal information, it's a dark pattern, and I'm not interested in using an app that leads with a dark pattern.

To be honest, if you're looking just for book info, ratings, and reviews, Booqsi probably isn't the right site for you anyways. It's specifically meant to be a social platform, not a ratings or reviews site, which is why we don't actually have give users the ability to do either.

We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your community about books, with the underlying motivation that a book recommendation from a friend (or seeing what their favorites are) is inherently more powerful than a random review online.

Having a login and simple profiles that represent your person seemed like the bare minimum for a social platform to function. Also worth noting... we're trying the magic link approach for logins, so a one-time email input is all that's required.

What's the downside to letting people who are just checking out your site actually check out your site?

No downside, it's just not something the site provides today as part of beta. An anonymous experience is something we're exploring.

A sign-up wall for a site which should be able to show me public book reviews and recommendations is a non-starter for me (and probably 99% of users clicking the link). I really don't need another social media platform, I would like a book discovery system though.

Yes, something(s) as a 100% "free sample" just makes sense, especially if traction is a goal.

I don't think reviews or recommendations are the goal of the site, as there is currently no way to add reviews or ratings, nor does the site provide any reviews or recommendations of its own. It's literally "just" a social network to talk about books on.

Most of the confusion would go away if they had read-only access for anonymous users. I suspect they chose to not do this because there just isn't much there yet.

You're going to miss out on a hell of a lot of organic search locking it away like that, and given your social platform goals, I would have thought growing the user base would be pretty important.

There's zero chance I sign up for this if I can't see it beforehand. It's not a good look for something that purports to be more open than goodreads.

From what I can tell, there is literally nothing to show if you don't sign up. The site is entirely social. You have a feed and recommendations which are shared among friends. It's basically like saying there's zero chance you'll sign up for email if you can't see it beforehand.

What an absurd thing to say.

> From what I can tell, there is literally nothing to show if you don't sign up. The site is entirely social. You have a feed and recommendations which are shared among friends. It's basically like saying there's zero chance you'll sign up for email if you can't see it beforehand.

If people weren't able to understand how email worked before signing up to it, you damn be sure that no one would sign up for it. But email is ubiquitous enough today that people don't need to understand how it works before signing up, because they likely already understand it.

But "social media for books" is different. Show me how the feed looks, show of it looks when people are using it. It's likely I either ignore it because I can't understand what it would give me without viewable screenshots about how it works before, or I sign up and land on an empty feed, getting discouraged from even using it because it's so empty when I first arrive.

Showing people how a product works before asking them to sign up is not a big ask, and something vital especially when trying to get people to sign up and commit to a new social network, when there are new ones created everyday.

People just want to see how stuff works before, and it'll take a couple of hours tops to add to the landing page.

Twitter doesn't make you create an account to see what other people are posting.

Pass.

signed up and the rating system is borrowed wholesale from google books and there are no reviews at all; so rating and reviews are not even a feature (yet?). not a good look, i'd love an alternative to goodreads but not even having a basic rating system is kinda defeats whatever purpose this site might be going for

The goal isn't to be another reviews or ratings site; that's been done before. The goal is to leverage the power of your personal book community to help you better decide what to read next. Drop book recommendations to each other, post about books to your feed and engage in discussion, see what your friend's favorites are by viewing their top 10 favorites shelf, etc.

But that is not an alternative to Goodreads' public view. It's only a copy of Goodread's social system.

Why are you more trustworthy than Amazon with my book reading habits?

NOTE: Your IP address for booqsi.com appears to be run on ... AWS ... seems ironic or shady, can't tell which.

Double ironic when the creator is saying things like:

> "... having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first place"

Yeah, we're using Heroku, which host all of their own services on Amazon's EC2 (meh), which was an unfortunately short-sighted tech decision early on that we're looking to remedy. We're hoping to transition to Azure or Google Cloud. Any recommendations?

I'm a happy fly.io customer. For small projects (i.e. you don't need 100 servers), I find them to be way better than any of the enterprise-focused players. They're like Heroku if Heroku had continued innovating.

You can quite reasonably want to be independent of Amazon-the-online-retailer while being agnostic about cloud service providers. Speaking personally, I very much want local bookstores in my neighbourhood, but do not care whether there is a cloud data centre in my city or province, or which one it is.

Are you purposely trying to be in bad faith? It's fine to give ideas and suggestions, but you are being VERY antagonistic. They are using Heroku FFS, this isn't a "shady" service because of that.

You are very trusting of random people on the internet.

There is no evidence to support the claims this person makes that it's not a part of Amazon itself. (I don't believe it it is a part of Amazon either, btw) It's a huge en devour to make a social network and it's got a slick interface and design.

My gut says this is not a one man show (he says "we" alot), they have _legal_ pages on their site (evidence of their priorities?), but no details on who they actually are on their about page, (lowers my trust factor by a lot) unlike a lot of other projects around here.

So, there is more evidence to support skepticism than there is to support carelessly believing some marketing blurb.

(edit: for clarity)

It's not just a usability issue.

OP, you need to deliver lots of public value to customers who haven't converted yet.

Always remember. "3 free articles a week" isn't you giving your stuff away.

It's marketing that costs you nothing.

Free marketing. Keep repeating it to yourself. Free marketing.

I signed up. This is what the site looks like:

* Dashboard/feed: https://i.imgur.com/bUGZX27.png

* Book page (from search): https://i.imgur.com/9BQK7hF.png

* Bookshelves (adding a book is just a modal on this page): https://i.imgur.com/sHzorJE.png

* "Community": https://i.imgur.com/nzI9FNZ.png

* Profile: https://i.imgur.com/kcxitYb.png

There isn't a lot of content to showcase, but the screenshots on the homepage (at https://www.booqsi.com/) seem to show off each of the currently-available pages. It'd be nice to have some kind of search to see book search result pages for yourself without signing up, but honestly there's not much to see (yet?). You can see for yourself: https://app.booqsi.com/books/9781408865446

Take my upvote :)

Can't sign up without providing a surname, either. Literally the first step after the magic login link, and already at a hurdle I'm not going to pass.

Very interesting... some feedback.

So I search for "Proust", and the top 8 results are not Proust. Since Proust has one extremely famous book, I thought it would show up, rather than a bunch of different commentary on Proust.

So I finally find the page for In Search Of Lost Time. However, it says none of my friends have read it. Well, of course not - I don't have any Booqsi friends yet. So, there's just nothing I can do on this page.

Next I looked for The Power And The Glory. At least this page has a summary of the book. But, also none of my friends read it, and there's nothing I can do here.

Next, Consilience. Same thing. Basically I search for a book, I get maybe nothing, maybe a summary, and then there's nothing else I can do on that page.

So, I want to like this site, but I'm just finding nothing I can do here.

Personally, I love books but I hate Goodreads. I just don't care that a hundred thousand random people prefer The Twilight Saga Complete Collection to The Death of Ivan Ilych.

I would be really interested to read a well-written paragraph that said, hey, if you like Nabokov and Borges, then you might like this other author. That sort of recommendation is what I occasionally get from reading blogs or tweets from people with a similar literary taste to mine, and it's very useful, I find most books through some sort of recommendation.

Goodreads has this mistaken idea that I care about the average person's opinion of a book. A book is not a can opener. Everyone wants to open a can, everyone opens cans in the same way, everyone appreciates a can opener that successfully opens cans.

Anyway, I hope you do succeed in building a Goodreads alternative, because I would love to spend more time reading about books, reading good books, discussing books, and Goodreads is just not providing that experience.

Thanks for the feedback! The book's info page doesn't have a lot going on, except to see some info about the book (or add it to a shelf, or recommend it to a friend) and see if any of your friends have read it.

Your comments about Goodreads and the average random person's opinion is spot on and one of the inspirations for wanting to build something new. I noticed that its my actual friends and family -- not necessarily a random person -- that have the biggest impact on what I read next. A book rec from a friend you respect goes a long way. Booqsi is attempting to harness some of that.

tastedive.com?

some great books you're mentioning here, I'd love to see your recommendations in an app like this, perhaps we'd need to move away from an algorithmic recommendation system, but rather influencers based on 'moods'? There is a radio station that works like this NTS, they even claim "not curated by algorithms", but still scalable and solid music. I love this concept.

Yeah, the problem to me with algorithmic recommendations is that they aren't sufficient. I don't see that an algorithm recommended book X, and then immediately go buy the book. No algorithm is that good.

So if I see an interesting book from the Amazon algorithm, the natural thing is to read the reviews, but book reviews are really hard for me to trust. So many people reading the book have a different background, different priorities, different reading ability, they are just looking for something different in a book. So when I read book reviews I simultaneously have to figure out "does this reviewer think like me?" and "is this the sort of book I want to read?" And Amazon or Goodreads book reviews are just too shallow for this.

Over time, though, I start to learn what book recommenders I can trust. Many different sources. Some friends of mine, some bloggers, some book awards, they like the same sort of book I do and I respect their recommendations.

I read a lot of books, though, and I'm not really sure if the "mass reading public" is similar enough to me for my personal product judgment to be relevant to the task of building a Goodreads competitor....

I'm glad another site for book lovers exists, and I wish you well!

But I think it's sad that Librarything has such poor marketing and branding that nobody ever thinks "well, there already is a better, cooler replacement for Goodreads, and it doesn't cost anything". It's been around for 17 years, has 2.6 million users, and very few people know about it.

thx! - all I knew before today was to avoid Goodreads at all costs! my "cookie counters" went off the charts at Goodreads - I literally will not open a page there for any reason now.. same with that ubiquitous picture-collecting site.. pinterest.. toxic to me now.

Agreed. The name "LibraryThing" is like a people-repellent compared to "GoodReads." Names matter.

I always thought Librarything was also bought by Amazon.

later: According to some pretty stale info on Wikipedia, Abebooks bought 40% of Librarything in 2006, and Amazon bought Abebooks entirely in 2008.

edit: https://blog.librarything.com/2008/08/abebooks-news-the-scoo...

https://www.librarything.com/topic/152033

> At the same time, it's well known that Amazon has an indirect but real stake in LibraryThing—they bought Abebooks, who were our first minority partner. People keep reporting that Amazon has 40%. That's simply not true—it fails to take account of our second funder, Bowker. (I remain the majority; I can't say how the rest divides up.) But this certainly muddies the message. For what it's worth, I want LibraryThing to make more money, and therefore my, Bowker and Amazon's stake to be worth more and more, but with Amazon now holding 100% ownership of BOTH our competitors (Goodreads and Shelfari), we can hardly do so without emphasizing what sets us apart.

I did not know Amazon had purchased Abebooks. Damn our antitrust regulators have been asleep for a long time.

Yeah, this really bothered me when I found out about it. I still use Abebooks but would happily switch to an alternative if there's one out there.

Try https://www.betterworldbooks.com/explore/explore-used_books - most of the time the cheapest price at Abebooks points at them anyway

I think the reason is that LibraryThing is significantly less UX-friendly than Goodreads. I use both; I use Goodreads to track what I consider "personal" reading, and I use LibraryThing to track what I consider "technical", but the big reason I have it broken down like this is because LibraryThing is just not as friendly to a user as the alternatives.

> sad that Librarything has such poor marketing

I did not know it even existed, I have imported all my books into it and will wean myself of Goodreads.

LT user for over a decade. I'll definitely stick to it as long as it maintains its feature set.

One of the nice things about it is its lack of decent AI (and they're open about it). They're not trying to hit those kinds of user engagement metrics.

I use BookWyrm [0], which is not only social but decentralized (ActivityPub) and thus interoperable with other social networks like Mastodon. It's nothing fancy, it just works and it is nice to be able to follow (or share) quotes or reviews on books within the Fediverse.

[0] https://joinbookwyrm.com/

As someone who has occasionally dabbled with fediverse, but never quite dived in, I have always found federated applications to be confusing from UX pov.

In this case, what does interoperability mean ? When I sign up for the service I see options to create profile with one of the instances - how to choose an instance is not very obvious from that page. Some instances have specific themes, others don't - should I choose based on how much my interest overlaps ? Based on reputation of who runs those instances ? What are the consequences if I make the wrong choice ?

Also, If I already have a mastodon account I can supposedly use that to participate in the discussions on BookWyrm. However I have no clue how to actually do that - any attempt to comment/like posts takes me to a login page which doesn't seem to have any support for connecting to Mastodon.

Until the UX improves for me to be able to make these kind of choices in a very short amount of time, I am more inclined to pick a traditional sign up and start using kind of service - and I'd assume I am not the only one.

I don't find BookWyrm to be confusing at all. I assume most people use many applications without diving into every single feature or learning an underlying API that may be available. Why should BookWyrm be evaluated according to a different standard? I feel like you're conflating your confusion with how the fediverse works with a particular application that you don't seem to have evaluated based on its own merits.

I tend to evaluate a service based on what the service provider advertises as selling points. In case of BookWyrm, the very first feature listed in the home page is that its Decentralized. As a user I'd want to understand how that is an advantage for me - it would seem I can't without getting familiar with underlying protocol.

I have nothing against BookWyrm, I'd like to see such initiatives succeed.

You can use BookWyrm without thinking about the federated aspect, and I think many do. The benefits is that you are not signing up to a walled garden and that people from other communities can follow and interact with you.

We have gotten so accustomed to global, closed off services (like Instagram, Twitter etc) that getting to choose from several communities with different rules and themes confuses us. But this is in fact how most forums and other online communities functioned before the age of Facebook etc, only now the communuties have the ability to talk to each other.

Maybe what the fediverse needs is a clearer story. I have found that most people get Mastodon or other ActivityPub-enabled services much more if I do not lead with the decentralized features, but the fact that it is ad-free and without algorithms deciding what you see (and not) in your feed. The interoperability is something they come around to appreciat later on.

Booqsi looks really pretty and I love that it supports local bookstores! Are there plans to support imports from Goodreads? I know many people who have curated their shelves for years so that might be an important feature for them to switch over.

I've been using and loving an alternative, https://www.thestorygraph.com/it has similar vibes to Booqsi and also includes a Goodreads import, AI based recommendations, and some mood-based book tracking (i.e tags like fast-paced, dark, emotional)

Are goodreads imports allowed? Isn't that kind of data sometimes against terms of service (for obvious anti-competitive reasons)?

GDPR demands a machine readable export of your data. You could import that and I can't see how this could violate any ToS.

Just noting that GDPR is an EU law, not an international one.

Well I don't think importing tweets and displaying them is allowed by their ToS for instance (even though some apps do), nor instagram pics.

The user owns the data, not the platform. The data is just ISBN numbers, dates, review comments and so on anyway.

It would probably be illegal to crawl Goodreads, if that’s what you’re thinking about?

I believe in some cases (e.g. instagram) the user agreement you sign when using the site makes your copyright over e.g. the pictures you upload be handed over to the site owners (again, to prevent competition). Just to point out that the common sense idea that "you own the data" thing isn't always true. Nevertheless this question has been resolved through other comments on here so it seems not to be the case in this scenario.

Goodreads allows you to export your library via CSV.

Right, if the question is asking about exporting your book lists from Goodreads and then (eventually) importing them into Booqsi, that's definitely allowed.

Yes, sorry! I may have phrased that incorrectly - I meant exporting your Goodreads data and importing them into Booqsi (which Storygraph allows you to do, though it can take some time).

Yes! We realized pretty quickly that we need a way to import booklists (specifically from Goodreads), so we're actively working on that! Should be rolled out soon.

Yes, I've used StoryGraph as well, but felt like I needed something that provided a few more social features. The book mention feature of the social feed is one of my personal favorites with Booqsi.

That sounds really great, good luck with that! I will definitely keep an eye on Booqsi, a social feed sounds really nice :)

Storygraph seems to be attempting something similar with the pair reads, but it feels a bit clunky and isn't there yet.

Storygraph also doesn't have an api, unfortunately. If they did I'd jump over wholeheartedly.

I applaud the effort! The "Amazon-free" part is attractive, considering that many of us feel that Amazon's business practices are abusive of employees, anti-competitive, and unethical in other ways.

I have stopped using Goodreads already--probably for a couple years now. I found that the only feature I really used was the "To read" bookshelf. And I found that I just replaced it with a specific "To read" list of reminders in my iPhone's Reminders app. For that use case, this seems to work great for me. Can you speak to potentially any features of Booqsi that would be an improvement over my simple / non-book-specific approach?

Thanks! Yes, having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first place.

You're not the first to use their Reminders (or Notes) app for book lists. If you're not interested in the social elements of Booqsi and just want to improve upon your current approach, a couple thoughts come to mind:

1. it's built specifically for books (unlike the Reminders app), so you'll be able to easily search for and add books to your "To read" shelf with the option to then "mark is as read" when you finished it, making it easy to track that aspect of your reading journey as well.

2. if you choose to buy it, it'll link you directly to bookshop.org to purchase it from a local bookstore instead of Amazon.

Now, if you wanted to elevate your experience, I feel like the social aspects of Booqsi is where it shines. For example:

1. if a friend drops you a book recommendation, it'll automatically add that book to your Books Recommended to Me shelf. If you like that book, you can move it to your "to read" shelf, or just go buy it. I've found it makes tracking book recs so much easier.

2. anytime someone in your community mentions a book, it'll come through your feed; you can then easily take action from it by navigating to the book's info page, adding to a shelf, going to purchase it, etc.

Those are just a few that come to mind! Regardless of if you want to use the site independently of others or engage more socially with others, there's something for everyone.

That actually sounds really cool! I’m signed up and will be trying it out. Thanks!

Luckily I signed up with fake data as it seems your profile search api returns full profile data not just data to be displayed, which includes the users full email address and whatever a stream token is. As far as I can tell there's no indication that this data is intended to be leaked.

I'm also not a fan of the raw queries to google, moving my data away from amazon and on to google doesn't seem like a step up.

I seem to be one of the few people here who likes Goodreads and uses it daily. I have no compelling reason to switch, but Booqsi looks gorgeous and fast, so I was interested in trying it out. I know it's early days, but a few things stand out.

Overall, the data seems a bit messy. I tried adding a few books from my currently reading list on Goodreads and ran into some problems. The first book I tried to add had a duplicate entry. Both had identical metadata but are separate records; if I marked one as finished it didn't update the other. Many books seem to be missing editions, alternate covers, subtitles, and other important details. Other times multiple editions seem to be split out as separate titles but with no clue to edition. This gets confusing fast for certain types of books.

It seems difficult to find people to follow. Everything looks to be private by default so I couldn't find people based on the books they read. The "people who read it" feature does not seem to work as expected. It seems it doesn't include books currently being read or books simply put on a favorite shelf without marking it 'read' - either that or I'm locked out of seeing what people I don't follow are reading. I have to follow them first? As it stands, I don't know anyone personally on Booqsi, so I'm relying on following interesting strangers based on reading habits, which I can't seem to do. It's doubtful my friends who already don't use Goodreads very much are going to switch, so I'm looking for Booqsi to be more like a "twitter for books", which it currently isn't without the option to be public.

A couple more books didn't exist and I didn't see an option to add it. I assume some crowdsourcing option like Goodreads is on the roadmap for Booqsi though.

There was a recent great podcast interview of How I Built This with the goodreads founders. I would strongly recommend listening.

IIRC they talked about the early days, reasons for selling to amazon, being viral before that was a term, growing while being profitable, realizing they got more traffic than the New York Times did, why they thought their site was better than alternatives.

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/04/1078415544/goodreads-otis-and...

+1 to importing from Goodreads (and, also, from my Amazon digital content list aka kindle-purchased books). I'm happy to go through an export/import cycle for these, but starting from scratch on booqsi without a bootstrap sets the bar too high.

And I agree 100% with your core sentiment: Goodreads is weirdly low-value.

Definitely a must. We're working on it; stay tuned!

Very neat, about time someone tried to disrupt goodreads. Here's some thoughts:

- Get people to create a bookshelf as part of the onboarding experience, even with just a few books that they are reading, or have read. What you'll be able to do is instantly provide some recommendations. Finding new books is hard! You have a nice opportunity here to drive really valuable recommendations. Amazon doesn't know what's on your shelf, they know what you've bought or "saved" to buy, this is important.

- Get influencers to upload photos of their bookshelves and do the leg work of digitizing them. Heck, maybe even make this a feature and auto-magically digitize your users' bookshelves for them. Or even better, do some research and figure out what vertically specific influencers are reading, then manually create those bookshelves and accounts.

- 10% affiliate fee is not going to be enough, you need to figure out a much better way to make money, this will be your hardest challenge.

For less social readers, I find openlibrary good for tracking books I want to read.

They have a lot of data, some a bit messy but the depth and breadth is insane. They link to scans of crazy old books, ebooks of the classics, are happy to link out to libraries etc. have lots of weird and wonderful old textbooks and have open APIs and silly amounts of open data for book geeks.

Yet another alternative: https://www.booksloth.com/

What is your plan for monetization? I’m currently using StoryGraph and it seems it will survive through paid users, but I’m uncertain whether a site like yours will continue very long unless you start monetizing it.

Another alternative I've seen recently is https://oku.club/

Meh.

Reading is a personal experience. I guess I understand the desire to make it more social -- but I'm not sure why I would go to the lengths to do so.

Is it some kind of gamification thing? I guess that's why I never got into Goodreads either.

I might be an outlier -- but I've never seen reading -- authentic, personal reading -- as anything other than personal.

I'm a social creature for sure, but I don't feel the need to share my reading lists. I always feel like social media is for creating a persona -- someone who want to be but aren't -- but want your "friends" to think you are.

This seems like it veers that way -- but I don't know. I didn't sign up -- but I was (obviously) curious enough to take a peek. And that probably says more about me than I care to acknowledge. :(

I agree, reading by nature is very personal. Have you tried reading when you're surrounded by a group of friends talking? Yeah, hard to do. Doesn't really work.

But, where I've found the "social" element being important is more in helping me to determine what to read next (like a friend recommending a book to me), discussing books with others or sharing something interesting about what I'm reading, seeing what my friend's of family's all-time favorites are, etc.

The interaction comes in-between reading sessions and has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of books.

There's one of these every other week. IMO "more social" and "Amazon-free" aren't the 10x improvements you need to compete with Goodreads

"more social" and "Amazon-free" may also not lend themselves well to bundling together. For me personally I'd love an Amazon-free version of goodreads that was built by someone who actually cared and updated it. The social stuff is a huge turn off though especially knowing it is being forced on the user judging from the other comments here

Reminds me of Brave browser that lumps "privacy browser" with "browser stuffed full of weird crypto crap", the latter I could do without.

Oh my god, thank you for saying that about Brave. Brave is by far my favorite browser, but all the crypto-pushing is just weird to me. It makes more sense to have them be add-ons, but the way the browser encourages it as part of it's functionality is indeed off-putting and why I took as long as I did to switch.

Impressive! It's a lot of work building a product like that.

Please support export of a user's data. I just lost all of my Goodreads data when some system problem of their's deleted all my data. I'm pretty mad about it, but at least I had a data export from eight months ago so not all is lost.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503465

Sorry to hear that you lost all of your data. That's rough. We're starting first with an import feature so that you can move all of your data into Booqsi, but an export feature is a natural follower to that. You should see both before too long!

Ironically, the feature that keeps me from using Goodreads is that I want it to be less social. Do you have the option for private bookshelves?

Ha, totally get that as well. Yes, private bookshelves are available! The only ones that are "public" are the shelves on your Profile.

https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/reading-log

There's a less social version with private bookshelves here https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

I'm glad someone's making this! I've been wanting an alternative for a while. I do have two questions:

1) Why can't I browse the site without an account? Is this temporary for the beta phase or a persistent design choice?

2) Do reviews allow GIFs? (I'm not willing to make an account just to see if existing reviews have gifs, and oddly enough, gifs would be a deal breaker for me).

After using it a few minutes, it's apparent that it's a very social site. There are no public reviews. You can write reviews and share them with specific friends or post them to your wall, but they're only ever visible to your friends. Presumably this is a privacy-focused design decision intended to increase sociability, but it would make an anonymous account useless.

There are no GIFs.

1). Persistent design choice, as its built to be primarily a social platform. We felt like an account with your name was bare minimum for something like this to function correctly.

2). No GIFs. But, noted that GIFs could be a fun add.

I actually wanted to make sure there were no gifs. I feel like gifs ruin reviews and make low quality reviews get the most 'engagement'.

If you add gifs, please allow an option to turn them off. That's one of my biggest pet peeves about Goodreads, a lot of reviewers put a gif after every sentence or two and it drives me up a wall. I want to read a review, not watch a series of tangentially-related short video snippets.

This is such a fashionable problem. There are startups / indiehackers trying to solve this every month.

The problem we're trying to solve is that existing book platforms don't provide the social features many book lovers are looking for and/or are archaically designed. The Amazon-less part is a bonus.

I'm not really interested in the social network aspect of Goodreads or Goodreads-likes, so I probably personally won't be using this -- but I do hope it succeeds. It's always nice to have more competitors in the space to drive innovation and new features, and we all know Goodreads could use some motivation!

As a side note though, I really hate the magic link sign-up paradigm (no password allowed). I know I'm not the actual audience here (although I am a huge reader), but if I were to use this I'd definitely want something more convenient than having to log in through email every time.

Looks great! I wonder if it would be possible to import data from Goodreads; many people use Goodreads to keep track of what they've read, and what they're planning on reading. They wouldn't want to lose that information by switching.

Giving authors tools for self-promotion is also a big deal -- and something many authors actively engage in with Goodreads.

One more thing, that should be higher priority: The ability to add books to the database. There's nothing more frustrating than wanting to add a book to a shelf, and not being able to! (Maybe it's already an option? If so, it's not easy to find.)

Definitely! Goodreads import is in the pipeline.

Agree on the author-sentiment too. The long-term vision is this to not just be a site for readers, but a site for authors, publishers, bookstores, etc. A true ecosystem. As a reader, you can follow your favorite authors and bookstores and receive updates, but as an author you can engage with your audience and self-promote. A win-win.

We pull all of our data from Google Books currently (so to avoid needing to maintain an internal database right away), so if it's not on Booqsi it's because it's not on Google Books. It's been fairly broad in scale, but we've certainly seen situations where books don't show up. Thanks for the feedback!

Does this contribute to the internet archive's open library?

https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/about#what

mek here from Open Library -- not sure what data booqsi is using but we're very happy to share our catalog's data publicly and freely with the world

https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps

Making it dependent on bookstore.org immediately cuts off international users. I'm not taking a transatlantic flight to "buy locally" - and the prices local bookstores ask for importing books are laughable (often three or four times the prices Amazon asks).

Sure, you could mention the ISBN, and I could manually go to Amazon, and find the thing, and buy it ... but what a hassle to me as the user just so that you as the site operator can make a political statement.

I would invite you to consider doing some geo-lookup of the user's ip address and provide alternative integrations.

I'd recommend to add social login options. It greatly reduce the initial barrier to sign up. Besides the usual suspects like Google or Microsoft, Github, Discord are also very good options.

Definitely. On the roadmap, with Google as one of the first we're rolling out. Not only does it reduce the barrier to sign up, it also helps you discover (or invite) friends.

> you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting

I’ve looked at several goodreads alternatives (because the site is slow and hard to navigate), but never liked any of them. This quote might explain why. I neither want it to be social, nor exciting. I want to track books read / to be read, and see the reviews of others (preferably without 5 million emojis, but that’s neither here nor there). If anything, GR already has too much social network messiness built-in for me.

I’m building something similar over at https://bookends.app. Still relatively new as well.

Good luck and I wish you all the success!

Looks cool. Good luck!

The reason I use Goodreads is to get publicly stated opinions on books, not for a social community. This is not an alternative to Goodreads for people like me at all.

Am I able to add more than one "currently reading" books? I will usually read a couple at a time and it'd be nice to select multiple. Also it would be nice to have the ability to quick select books from my "Books I've Read" bookshelf when adding books to my recommended feed since I would almost never recommend a book I haven't read.

Also, are there privacy settings? I might not want a public profile or have only parts public.

I'd love to have a reading list well-managed and with minimal friction to add and track (without buying yet).

I use both 1. Amazon shopping list, and 2. a custom chrome extension -to- airtable action.

The second lets me track who recommended this to me and why I would want to read this. Usually I have this context only at the moment of discovering a new book (often on HN, or blogs I frequent) but it's incredibly helpful when deciding what next book to read.

Have you seen this? https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

Interesting, but that name is cringey for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but the way it looks and how it is said in my head, puts me off.

I wanted to say the same thing, it is quite rare that I feel the name is so bad that I don't want to be part of it. I am sorry to feel this, but it is my (strong) first impression.

Random question - Did goodreads ever make money through Amazon's affiliate program? (Before Amazon acquired them). If so, how does the site not break affiliate partners terms of service? It could effectively list every single book product on it's site and slap an affilate link on there. The ref link exists now, but a unsure how that gets rolled into current amazon metrics/accounting.

Do the affiliate terms of service say anything about linking to too many things? I would think Amazon would be thrilled to have a popular site link to millions of their products.

That's a great question. I can't say for sure that Goodreads was part of Amazon's affiliate program prior to them being acquired in 2013, but I don't see why they wouldn't have been.

Booqsi is specifically not part of Amazon's affiliate program and instead of focused on the local bookstores via bookshop.org, so I'm not an Amazon affiliate expert, but I would imagine that Amazon wouldn't have any issue with a site like this linking users to purchase books from them.

As a potential power user of your platform, let me just say I really hope you solve the book recommendations problem, agnostic of sales or other influence. I spent almost as much time hunting for new books/authors as I do actually reading them.

Social feeds, custom bookshelves, etc. are all already-solved problems or window dressing compared to this real gap of creating a truly usable book graph.

I really like the idea of a book graph. Heck, if the platform suggested that I read the references for books I'm currently reading, that would be interesting.

Yeah, Amazon's seems to be based off of customer purchase history and some tagged metadata, but almost always just ends up recommending the most popular book by sales (which are not necessarily the best).

Short of some infeasible brute NLP of books, I can't really think of ways to do this in an automated fashion, outside of gamifying data input from users.

You can submit citation data for any written work (including books or scholarly articles) on Wikidata and view the citation, coautorship etc. graphs on the Scholia frontend. Works quite well in practice.

Dear @justinberding is there an API for Booqsi data? Are you welcoming corporate re-tweets of content? Who is the best person to reach out to?

We're pulling all of our book data from the Google Books API, so Booqsi itself doesn't store any of that data. As for reaching out, feel free to email contact@booqsi.com.

Can't see the site without sign in = I'm not going to sign up just to see your platform for the first time. Not a great impression.

cool, looks nice and easy to use. def gonna try out.

but, this doesn't support indie bookstores if it's using a bookshop, unless it's the affiliate link for a specific bookstore. instead, it's likely an affiliate link for the creator of booqsi. if you're trying to let consumers support indie bookstores, then linking to indiebound with the isbn in the url will let them choose a local bookstore, and not booqsi's affiliate bookshop. example: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196

sorry, but as a former indie bookseller, i get bothered by these tech apps who link to their affiliate bookshop and try to sell themselves as helping out indie bookstores. they're not.

edit: might be a cool feature for a user to choose their preferred indie to link to. if you did that, you could probably market it to the bookstores and they might want to use it too.

When you were a bookseller, why didn’t you use bookshop.org? Is there some problem with it?

All of the independent book stores that I know about around me are on there.

I don't have a problem with a brick and mortar indie sharing a bookshop link to their own shop, because they get a cut from that transaction. I don't like it when a bookish SaaS app uses the bookshop affiliate thing and tries to market itself as a win for the independent stores, it seems a bit misleading to me.

And when I was a bookseller, bookshop didn't exist except for an idea. I stopped working for the store right before it launched. I actually learned to code from doing a frontend redesign of my store's online store, which was offered by indie commerce. If done right, indie commerce can be a better deal for a bookstore because the store gets the full cut and just pays indie commerce a monthly subscription (at least when I was there, i think i've seen news of them changing their model or at least raising their subscription price). With indiecommerce, the store acts as a distributor (mostly, when the book is in stock at the store). Whereas bookshop doesn't use the bookstore's physical inventory, and instead ships directly from ingram (the monopolistic book distributor) and gives the bookstore a cut like an affiliate.

Bookshop is not a bad deal for a smaller store without a lot of resources or staff, but it doesn't always let an indie do what an indie does best: sell some of their unique physical inventory, like signed or rare or small press books that aren't distributed by ingram.

I've been using this for a few months now and it's great! Love the more nuanced options for reviewing and tagging books.

This is awesome, but I feel like you're going to struggle to compete if all the content is behind a membership wall.

Totally get the sentiment, but also felt like a membership wall was required for building out a platform that is primarily social in nature. Would be interesting to see what anonymous features we can provide down the road.

I suspect the anonymous features are how you get more road. I assume that 99% of people, even with an interest in an alternative to Goodreads and Librarything, are going to bounce when faced with registration, and since they haven't seen anything, won't remember anything.

If you're going to demand registration, I think you have to make a good value proposition off the bat. Probably in the form of a specific practical way the site can be used as an application, with the social thing as a bonus. Right now it looks like a site that after I spend a lot of time entering my books into for the dubious benefit of seeing a picture of them on a virtual bookshelf, will be a ghost town abandoned within a year.

Maybe make the database tools very general and flexible, with easy exports and reports, and push that first? I think of Goodreads, Librarything, and for a slightly leftfield comparison Boardgamegeek, as database-first sites that build community on the fact that they provide free, specialized, and sometimes publicly accessible databases to hobbyists.

I think people are going to be more motivated to join by being exposed to the content. As is, you're just giving away your contact info to someone who might be hitting your inbox 3 times a day.

Ugh. Hate it when I get emails from noreply@ .. how about setting up an email address for support?

How do I find other people? I guess I can't find people on the site to network with? I have to find them outside and bring them in?

I'd like to have a username and be able to expose a bookshelf, e.g. King Charles' Favourite Business Books

The email you're referring to is just the single "magic link" email to get you signed in for the first time, which is how Slack and other "magic link" sign-in processes do it too.

You can reply to every other email you receive from booqsi and someone from the team will see it and get back to you. Or, you can reach out directly to contact@booqsi.com or feedback@booqsi.com.

Why not just set one of those addresses as the reply address for the magic link?

I had a hard time finding anything with the search. I could not find The Antidote by Burkeman at all. I tried it with the ISBN as a last resort, but multiple books showed up (not the antidote). Shouldn't an ISBN just return only a single result?

UI is too modern. I really like Goodreads UI. It is like old Windows. It is like that old Porsche. Sure, you have everyone driving new fancy futuristic things. But you also want "old" feel. dunno, I really like Goodreads aesthetics.

I'm not too into the social activities when it comes to the media I consume, but I do use https://rate.house/ to keep track of everything.

Looks neat - congrats on the launch!

Could you give a high-level overview of the tech stack? I'm specifically curious how you work with the social graph data aspects and approaches to generating recommendations.

A siloed version of Goodreads is very unappealing. Goodreads is not perfect but at least I can read about a book without being force to login and join. Good luck but it's not for me.

I'm really happy to see a non-Amazon site for this purpose. That's great. But this is just as proprietary. If it takes off it will become property of one of the FAANGs.

So close and so far.

If you really dislike Amazon or really want to support your local bookstores, a more low-hanging fruit might just be to create a browser plugin that replaces the links on Goodreads.

I commonly rely on Goodreads for book reviews before deciding if it's worth spending the time to read. Any chance of integrating functionality like this with z-lib.org?

I had no idea Goodreads was an Amazon service. Frankly, the whole site feels pretty janky. I'm surprised they would have acquired it and then not invested more.

Is there a way to import goodreads, I often use the books that I’ve added to goodreads to choose the next book, if this were a feature would definitely move to it.

Keep your book reading info private!

If we drift into a world that is ruled by authoritarian leaders the information collected on these kind of sites is too dangerous to publish.

I don’t particularly care for Amazon, but what exactly is unique or interesting about your service other than not being associated with Amazon? The social feed?

I really wanted to like this website but I find the lack of password and magic links a very annoying way to authenticate to the website. I also imagine the magic link would confuse many users who are used to a traditional login form with email address and password.

I admit, this site caught my attention but I refuse to have to check my email, for a link that doesn't resolve behind my firewall, just to authenticate to the site (every single time).

Honestly, Goodreads without an account is more useful than this site with an account. At least I can search and read reviews on Goodreads without an account.

To clarify on the magic link, you only have to do that the first time. The authentication in the backend remembers you when you go back to the site, automatically logging you in. Ideally you'll only have to check your email once.

This is assuming you're always on the same device, don't clear cookies, don't use multiple browsers/profiles, don't mask your browsing in other ways, don't use rotating/temporary emails, etc. I logged in three times today and needed a magic link each time. My password manager would have autocompleted correctly in any of those situations... were there a password field to use.

I've gone weeks not logging into services like Slack before just to avoid dealing with trying to get into associated email accounts. Magic links are one of my least favorite "convenience" paradigms to emerge over the past couple years: they're less efficient, less secure, and more annoying/confusing friction for many users, and reinforce a reliance on email at a time when many people are trying to wean off it.

Best of luck with the rest of the site though!

I don't care about your beef with Amazon. They serve the world, while your choice of vendor only serves US customers with US credit cards.

> if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting.

Sorry, not sold.

I'm a huge Letterboxd fan, and have thought for a long time that a similar app could gain traction for books. I hope this is it!

Is there any decentralized books/movies tracking service?

Like hosting my reviews and read list on a git repo or something.

Easy backup, portable, exchangable.

An alternative to Goodreads is https://www.anobii.com

This would work better if it has the following: - Mobile app which uses contacts - Import and sync from third-party services

Looks similar to http://italictype.com

this is great work -- if you y'all need more book data (or non-google data) or have any interest in featuring free borrow links to titles which are digitally available from the Internet Archive's digital library, let me know and I'm happy to help.

- mek from Internet Archive's Open Library

Currently no account management? Like how to delete the account.

Our security software flags this as malware (Cisco Umbrella)

awesome to see a Blitz.js-built app on the front page :)

I want a password login, not a magic linkery :crying:

this looks great Justin! I've always found Good Reads to be very unappealing.

What did you use as your source of book data?

Thanks! Google Books is our source currently.

I like books but don't give a shit about book stores. But then reading was never a social thing for me so the whole stupid coffee shop hipster sales person nonsense is not up my alley. I'll take Amazon a thousand times over your average 21st century book store.

Best of luck - anything that's an alternative to Amazon, Google, Netflix/Disney/Hulu, Spotify, etc. and their many subsidiaries and affiliations is a plus in my eyes!

As much as I love this, I’m becoming an Apple snob. I just want apple to build out this type of social network with all of their apps.

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