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Human curation is something that is definitely missing these days and was severely undervalued with the growth of the internet. I rarely conduct a Google search without appending "reddit" to the query. Because I know I want actual human answers. We are, ironically, using Google today as if it were the Yahoo! curated catalog of 1997. Because we can't trust that the links Google returns aren't some autogenerated SEO-driven affiliate link garbage.

The same applies to music. Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios (before they were sold and cannibalized by Clear Channel/iHeartMedia) and early 1980s MTV really nailed. We want a knowledgeable human to guide us through the landscape of books, music, film, and everything else.

> Not "highest rated" or "most popular" - but books I wouldn't get otherwise exposed to that an employee has selected carry, and display.

In the past few years Netflix introduced their "Top 10" feature which is prominent near the top of their app. This was the reason I unsubscribed from Netflix. I had been a member since 2004. The "Top 10" feature reminded me on a daily basis that I have no interest in the content Netflix has. Previously I had assumed (because of their rather horrible discovery mechanisms) that Netflix had a much deeper catalog and I could find something to watch if I keep searching. The top 10 list made me finally realize their offerings simply were bad. The value of the service wasn't there.

I am trying to fix this with book browsing online, try shepherd.com and let me know (ben@shepherd.com). I go to authors and ask them to share 5 books around a topic/them they are passionate experts in, and then i try to connect it in different ways to make browsing fun :)

Only 10 months old and trying to integrate genre now…

Dude... This is really good! If I wasn't on the most limited budget I've ever been on, I would have just bought like 3 books without even blinking.

I don't know how you managed to get such a large list of bookshelves already, but I'm impressed.

Thank you, that is awesome to hear :)

Ya, I worked really hard in the early days to get a ton of lists and now I've built out a small PT team that helps me contact authors and shepherd them through the publishing process. We are adding ~400 lists a month, and it takes a TON of time to set it all up, vet it for quality, format, setup all the data, etc.

I've got some really great stuff coming, and I hope to leave beta toward this summer or fall.

I'm sure you already know this, but “genre” boundaries are fuzzy. (Some people refute the concept entirely, which I think is a bit silly.) There are several different ways to define each genre. If you can do some magic with your genre data that lets me sort some books into what I think of as genre classifications (say, if I consider Star Wars a fantasy work), then automagically lets me filter by that… Not sure how useful, or possible, that actually is, but it seemed like a good idea when I started writing the comment.

Apart from thinking that Minecraft was set in Washington D.C., it gave multiple good-seeming suggestions for all the random topics I thought to put into it. That's pretty impressive, especially given (or, perhaps, because) your data is manually curated. Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?

Yep, I am going to need to start by using BISAC or THEMA which are a pretty standardized format used in the industry. I am testing both now to figure out which I want to use, or if I could use a combo (if that his helpful).

BISAC has 1 to 5 categories assigned to a book, pretty standard.

THEMA is similar, but has a qualifier which is a cool concept. So you can add a location, age group, or other qualifiers to help define who the books is for.

Ya, right now we use NLP to analyze a bunch of data to to determine what the book is about. It works pretty well but I am working to improve some of that :).

"Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?"

I am not familiar, can you tell me more or send me a URL? I don't know what that is :) (ben@shepherd.com I added it to my list to check out via google search as well)

https://bookwyrm.social/ is a project to basically make a group of decentralised book-based social media sites, a little like Goodreads (but on the Fediverse). Something being made available over ActivityPub isn't a copyright license to use it, but you could contact individual people and ask to be able to use their reviews, if that's something you wanted to do. (There's probably some degree of “permission by default” that you get, but as I'm not a copyright lawyer I tend to play it safe.)

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Ben this is pretty neat. I've lined up a couple of reads already.

Awesome thanks!

I am trying now to bring genres and other data in, my hope being that if you are on the WW2 page you can filter it to show only history, or only historical fiction, or even science fiction.

And, I would like to do similar on genre pages (yet to be built), so that if you are on a fantasy genre page, you can filter down to elves, dragons, or things like that.

Big technical challenges but I am going to see what I can do. This is something I've been wanting for a long time, and playing with some cool formats other than the current one to help people bump into awesome books/authors.

> Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios

This was orignaly Pandora's big selling point.

Every track sent to them was analyzed by someone with a degree in music to help build a recommendation engine. It was a combination of algorithms and people.

I am not sure how well that scaled or if they still do that, for the longest time Pandora had a tiny selection of music and I presume the reason was their intake process.

I'm glad I was able to satisfy my movie bucket list when Netflix still had a large catalog of DVDs.

Netflix today also has weird gaps, like if a show had 5 seasons, Netflix only has seasons 2 and 3 available.

The Netflix DVD recommendation system was fantastic. Massive selection of films, rankings based on what you liked, nothing seemed to be actively pushed at you. I certainly liked it better than the way they have their streaming site laid out.

I feel their interests were aligned with their customers with the dvds - now they’re almost adversarial as they want you to watch their content or the cheapest content.

It also didn’t hurt that the dvds had everything

You nailed it. Misalignment of incentives.

With DVDs, it cost the same to send A or B or Z, and they made more money if you rented more or got a more expensive subscription that let you get more. So, they were highly incentivized to have a huge catalog and send you stuff you actually wanted.

With streaming, they want to push certain content based on what they're paid by their content partners, or what SEO tells them you will accept, and they want to do it for the lowest cost possible.

> Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios (before they were sold and cannibalized by Clear Channel/iHeartMedia) and early 1980s MTV really nailed.

This is interesting to me, as someone who's played with Spotify and Tidal but mostly stuck with Apple Music. In part I think this is inertia -- if you stick with any of these streaming services for more than, say, half a year, then it's probably not worth switching unless there's a really compelling reason -- but all three of the services have both human-curated playlists and algorithmically generated ones, and it seems to me that Apple Music has the best curated playlists of any of those three. Spotify has the best algorithmically generated playlists of all three, but I find the best discovery trick for me is to let Apple's algorithms recommend curated playlists. :)

(Tidal, at least when I was last a regular user, was genuinely bad at algorithmically generated playlists and pretty mediocre with their curated ones. I'm not really sure what their unique strengths are beyond being willing to deeply integrate with virtually everyone and offering streams with MQA, which is basically a lossy hi-res format.)

> I rarely conduct a Google search without appending "reddit" to the query.

Same here. I added a custom search keyword to chrome that automatically puts site:reddit.com after the %s.

Since you mentioned Spotify, I would like to plug my favorite music site and app, Hype Machine (hypem.com) which combines the simplicity of RSS and a curation of blogs to make a great discovery engine (once you found the right blogs to follow)

It’s a bit of the best of both worlds, aggregation and app features like a solid tech company, and human magic that feels like local music store rather than top 20 radio stations

Total opposite Spotify experience - their "Discover Weekly" playlist has turned me on to so much cool music I don't think I would have found elsewhere. I don't like a lot of what they do (why would I listen to podcasts there?!) but that playlist is what keeps my subscription. Added bonus is that friends share _their_ discovery playlists with me and I get to hear a different curation based on their different musical tastes.

I absolutely loved the University Village Amazon bookstore. I've got a big list of reasons why. First of all, there was no need to absolutely pack the books. Each book was displayed cover out, with some space around it, with maybe an endorsement or a bit of a review under it. It made it easy to discover interesting stuff simply by looking around. As a sci fi nerd, I'm used to the sci fi section being a bunch of paperbacks squished together floor to ceiling with just a vague title and an author name facing me. This was a huge step up. I found more than one new book there, and knowing that I'd get the Amazon price for it when I checked out made purchasing it and walking out an easy call (unlike at another bookstore, where for a new release I would've had to choose between getting it today or getting it 30% off the "list price" on Amazon).

That said, the whole reason this works as a store design is that the store has no particular motivation to have a big back catalog. If they don't have it, you're just gonna go get it on Amazon, so they haven't lost a sale anyway.

The store did get worse over time, though. More and more of the floor space became focused on selling a bunch of stuff that worked with Alexa. Stop it. You're not an Apple Store. Just be a book store. And as much as the book selection was pretty great to me the first few times I went in, when I stopped in a year later and the book selections were mostly the same, it was a lot less great.

yes, I'll +1 this. The Amazon Bookstore at U Village is (was?) great. Super helpful staff, roomy, good curations/recommendations, and way way cheaper than independent bookstores. I'll miss it

There's a joke: "Escape room idea: Just a well-stocked bookstore with clearly marked exits. You have one hour to get out. Good luck."

Elliott Bay Books exemplifies that meme better than almost any place in the world. Not only does it do an almost preternatural job of putting books you might like in front of your face, but it's a literal warren that can be tricky to escape from after you've finally woken from your book-induced reverie.

Or Powell's in Portland. That place is a maze and it's fun getting lost.

Is it really an Escape Room if you don't want to leave?

> I'm physically incapable of visiting a good independent bookstore without buying something.

I'll join the club.

In Japanese, there's a word for it: tsundoku. It describes a person who buys books and mostly doesn't read them.

Often they pile up on the floor, on shelves, and assorted pieces of furniture.

Virtually my Audible resembles this.

I'm also this way about wine. I don't feel an ounce of guilt because I'll drink each one when the time is right. That is equally true for books.

I"m guessing these people do not move very often. I have one rule when helping friends move, I don't move books.

I wonder if this is why I've never found much joy in browsing at chain bookstores (Indigo, in Canada). It's all just bestsellers, and half the products aren't even books, they're like kitchy home-decor items, candles, blankets, cozy "reading" pajamas and whatnot. I guess it's lures intended to stimulate impulse purchases out of people who already know they're not going to read anything they buy anyway.

Whereas you go to the indie store and there's an entire shelf in the back dedicated to heraldry, seemingly for no other reason than that it's an area of acute personal interest for the proprietor.

Chapters was great when they first opened, with a massive selection of books on many topics. Even without much in the way of curation, the selection alone made it possible to go a bit nuts with purchases.

Over time, their selection became poorer and poorer. Say, the "computer science" section of old, eventually lost anything like a text book, and became a few shelves of certification guides and "X for Dummies" books. Getting bought by Indigo only brought the coup de grace, when half of _those_ books were now replaced with candles and kitsch.

I just can't get over the fact that there are so few actual books at Indigo now, that the mock living room sitting area set up in the middle of the store has billboard walls around it printed with murals depicting bookshelves.

Oh, oh no. That's just gross. I don't live close to an Indigo store now, and usually don't bother to enter the nearest when I am around. I'll have to go and look for this cringe now though.

In the 90s, I credit a huge amount of my love and appreciation for electronica to the folks at my nearby Tower Records. That single store, with a single listening station in the Electronic Music section, holding only 6 CDs, exposed me to music I never would have heard before. It wasn’t anything from the Billboard 100 or top streams on Spotify, it was just what some local electronic music nerds thought was new and cool and I am forever grateful to them for what they decided to share, as well as desperately mournful that I’ll never have that kind of experience again.

If you're a fan of Tower Records, check out this great documentary: "All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records".

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/all_things_must_pass_the_ri...

In the 90s, the local community radio (Dallas' KNON) had a show on Thursday evenings. I can't remember the name of the show, but I'm pretty sure the DJ's name was Marty something. He would always sign off with "remember kids, fly low and avoid the radar". I would record his sets and play them back later at house parties. Later came Edge Club on KDGE that aired from midnight to like 4am or something. I lived out in the boonies, so a trip to Tower Records was very rare for me, but I never left without a stack of CDs. It wasn't until college that I started collecting and spinning vinyl.

They helped me realize that what I value about going to a good independent bookstore is curation. Not "highest rated" or "most popular" - but books I wouldn't get otherwise exposed to that an employee has selected to carry, and display.

This is something I am bothered by: if top ten lists are based on what people buy, and what people buy is based on top ten lists, where does humanity enter into the picture?

In the future we will have advanced AI like GPT-3 trained on the internet, generating content for the internet at far larger scales than humans, with that content being consumed to train the next generation of AI, like a snake eating its own tail and pushing human content into irrelevance. I feel like there’s the potential here for a dystopian novel where future humans are desperately trying to connect with another human in a giant maze of algorithmically generated conversations served up by AI bots through the metaverse.

The annoying thing is that this is basically all replicable online, except Amazon has apparently never even tried.

Like, say I'm interested in 14th-15th century European history, maybe I have a couple good books already that I know. You could go to a university library and look them up on the shelves, and find a wealth of related books near them. Amazon won't even give you that level of browsing by library classification, using data which already exists. They have the same half-assed recommendation system which seems to have barely changed in the past 15-20 years.

Amazon used to do a lot in that space, they had a big focus on customers creating and sharing lists of products. Your list was almost a blog post where you could write descriptions of each item and why they were there, order them, etc. I remember in the mid-2000s these lists were some of the best ways to find good books and products--there were always great "here's a roundup of the best technical books for programming language X/Y/Z" lists that I would seek out for example.

It looks like there's much less focus on Amazon lists these days. Maybe they got rid of it entirely--it's hard to tell, all I can find are wish lists and such now.

I feel like in the future, or maybe even now, there will be an opportunity to have something like a super nice, independent book store, but with the value proposition being more about the experience. Since people can always actually buy the book online, brick and mortar stores should shift to something that can't be replicated online. This would be particularly attractive for people who live in a city, where they may want somewhere warm and aesthetically pleasing to hang out, that's semi-social.

I think coffee shops demonstrate this in a way, but they don't go far enough, compared to what I'm thinking of. I imagine somewhere that has comfortable places to sit, read, and even some food, but primarily what you're paying for would be like a monthly membership.

When I travel, for example, I prefer now to stay in hostels over airbnb's, just because I like having an easy way to hangout and meet other people. I can still be online and do work, but at certain hours there's also more social activity and I appreciate both aspects.

I think we're beginning to understand that algorithms suck at making the kinds of judgements that make human interactions interesting and worthwhile.

More of everything is not necessarily better. More of everything filtered algorithmically can be actively worse - not just because of poor modelling and information loss, but because the goals of the algorithm (typically related to some combination of hard sell and addiction) are diametrically opposed to a good human experience.

There is such a thing as culture, and algos are incredibly toxic to it.

Incidentally your semi-social idea is exactly what "clubs" provide in the UK.

Not many people know about clubs, which is strange, because they're incredibly influential on politics and culture.

They're subscription-only spaces for mostly upper middle class people in an expensive building - most in central London, a few scattered around other big cities - that offer food, social contact, and networking opportunities.

Most have curated selective membership. You have to be invited and approved before you can join.

They're also split by profession - politicians, lawyers, media personalities, musicians, journalists, creatives, and so on.

There used to be one for London startups. (Possibly still is - I haven't checked recently.)

Yeah I hear/feel you on basically everything you said. Still, I just want a nice, comfortable place that I can go hang out for long parts of that day. I don’t care about it being exclusive and I would prefer it not to be.

When I was growing up book stores were kind of that place, but most of that has gone away.

The best independent bookstore I know of are the thrift stores. I find all kinds of unusual books there, and best of all, they're dirt cheap so if they don't work out, I just donate them back :-)

> Often far too much of something. It's an expensive disorder I have.

We should form a support club or something, I'm the same as you even though I live half-way around the globe. Something tells me we're not the only ones.

The Amazon store has local books on display, especially in the kids section (eg one on the space needle). It isn’t as good as the Barnes and Noble that used to be in the same shopping center, but to be honest the nicest thing about those were the cafes.

I actually burned myself out on books a long time ago. Very few deliver what they seem to offer on the shelf or website. Papers (individual publications curated via peer review) offer more for technical topics, and there is a lot of fiction online that is way more enticing (and…those that don’t work can be dropped after a few pages without being any poorer).

As someone who only reads technical books I enjoy the Amazon bookstore but primarily for books for my kids. Barnes and Noble's kids book section can be overwhelming. The Amazon Bookstore is smaller in scope and I can quickly grab a few popular books to filter through. For the same reason I like buying kids books directly from scholastic books website. They're pre-filtered for popular books at the right age/reading level.

I used to read a helluvalot more than I do now. After coding and looking at text all day, I'm ready to not look at text any more at the end of the day. I've tried keeping a book on the nightstand to read for a bit before going to sleep, but I've really just gotten out of the habit entirely now. That's kind of sad thinking about it enough to type it out.

You are spot on, and it is such great fun to browse a book store, it sounds amazon sterilized it which is probably a rare misread on what target customers wanted.

When I visited Amazon's book stores they always had little end caps with curated selections of books. Employee picks, celebrities like Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey reading lists, etc. I agree independent stores have a lot more character but Amazon's store wasn't just a cold, sterile pile of books that an algorithm picked.

This is partly what's driven me to second hand/charity bookshops.

No, they don't have exactly the book I've been looking for. But occasionally they have absolute gems that I'd never have found independently.

I bought an electric kettle once from an Amazon Bookstore, but that was it. I may have bought a coffee once or twice. Like you, I walked in about 20 times previously.