Small Demons: Seeking A Better Path to Book Discovery | Hacker News Reader

Small Demons: Seeking A Better Path to Book Discovery

publishingperspectives.com

28 pointspatrickyeon9 comments

Details from fiction, cataloged and connected to other books and the real world.

Fascinating idea. Signed up, looking forward to the invite.

This is something that Wikipedia could have done. I suppose it does do this as a casual side effect, but SD is doing it explicitly.

My major question (as usual) is how are they going to make money. Maybe that will be clear when I get an account. I'm assuming it will be through affiliation or even direct sales.

Which reminds me how bad Amazon's recommendations pages suck. I'm constantly surprised that a company with their resources can produce something which is useless at recommending me anything.

Have you used Goodreads? When you first sign up they ask you to rate books, and each time based on a book you read it shows 4 more that are related, I was VERY surprised how accurate it was for some chains of books, especially when compared with Amazon.

Having said that, this sounds like an awesome idea, waiting for an invite now!

No I haven't, but I will. Thanks.

I wouldn't say they suck - they're based on the purchasing patterns of similar people.

However, they're not great. But you still find good stuff - got to the third page of my Kindle recommended page before I found something, but that's better than nothing!

Their emails on the other hand...

Today for example, after buying a pack of four HP ink cartridges, I was recommended to buy each of the four ink cartridges individually. Brilliant.

As a book, apparently I'd really enjoy Twilight. Can't wait for that one.

And I have a hundred Kindle sleeves being recommended to me after I bought a decent case for the thing.

So the recommendations vary between things I definitely don't need, and teenage vampire novels.

I want their recommendation page to recommend me good stuff. I adjust the recommendations, but still I get nothing useful at all. sigh

I remember the amazon self-published spam-book problem (people scraping wikipedia etc. and self-publishing thousands of low quality e-books on the kindle marketplace) And I wonder how this will translate for Small Demons, when someone with an SEO mindset will try to leverage this system? We'll see new "optimized" books, full of celebrities names, brands, products, companies, etc.

Interesting to consider this as a type of approach to 'the problem of metadata'.

That is, obtaining rich metadata about some domain (here, books) and finding a practical use to put this metadata to.

wow, what a fantastic idea.

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