Show HN: Engineering Book Club

I'm with you that people should be paying for services with money instead of their private data. If you were running a Slack/Discord alternative and wanted to charge for it, I'd support you. Maybe not 50 Euros support you up front, but I'd support you. You only need a few thousand users to make something like 10 Euros a year a lucrative side project, and I'm sure you could get people to pay more if you earned any trust at all first.

Where you lost me is that I don't need your help getting people together to talk about books. Sure, that's worth bringing some snacks, in person, which might add up to 50 Euros over the course of a year, but doing it on the internet with a bunch of unknown randos makes the value go down, not up. And putting a fixed price on it means you get less interesting people: on the one end, it excludes the broke intern who needs the mentoring the most, and on the other end, that senior, experienced, well-thought-out guy who brings a fuckton of knowledge to the table brings more value than the host just by opening his mouth.

Where you really go off the rails is this: "There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free." Yes, there is, actually. I don't know what it is about some people on Hacker News who can't comprehend that there are other motivations besides money. If you're only motivated by money, I don't want to be around you, let alone go to your book club.

I disagree.

If you gave the service away for free and allowed people to be anonymous, there would be no private data that needed managing. In the 90s, a major proportion of websites on the internet had forums like that, which people set up on a weekend (think phpBB). What the hosting provider charges is small change.

If you do charge, you suddenly have sensitive data to manage, either eating into your profit or creating a liability for you and taking away from people's privacy if you don't do it right. So much so, that it might even generate a loss at 50 bucks per year.

Lol no

Those people would also organize and run the club. This is just a site to connect people together. That's the easy part.

I've seen much the same filtering/curation effect achieved by charging any amount, not just absurdly high amounts.

Are people actually curating the content? The website sounds like the members are the ones suggesting books. It is unclear to me what managing needs to be done if the members are pairing up on their own.

> I also believe that paying for something brings more commitment, so this is why we have decided to introduce a small fee for joining the community.

Absolutely. People that are willing to pay are more serious and generally more likely to positively contribute. Paying is a way to signal that to oneself, even.

This group is limited to 30 people. It's not a subreddit with tens of thousands of users.

It is 30 people. If someone's an asshole you ban them. It's hardly a fulltime job. The fact that you took their money could actually complicate your ability to ban them if they really get upset.

I have discord servers of gaming friends that have as many people. I've also managed game servers (like Ark servers) with hundreds of strangers. It's not that bad. Bad people venture in sometimes and you just kick them out. Small communities like this mostly self-regulate because they are so small, people's individual reputation actually means something.

Agree, I have been organising local Meetups in the past and I know how much time it takes.

> I can create a free Discord for this right now and it'll cost me (and the people joining it) exactly 0€

But the reality is that you haven't.

We want to initially limit only to 30 spots to see how we could manage the community and the online events. We will evaluate if it makes sense to open more spots in the future.

The idea is to create "online coffee chats" where everyone is able to participate.

I have used Circle with other communities and I can say that the experience is much better than using slack or discord.

Great, where's your discord link?

Can we pair it with monthly or quarterly hackathons that implement some facet described in the book?

I'd participate - I find it much more engaging to read and discuss with others.

Go for it. Pick 12 books and create a schedule for the year. Every month just create an Ask HN post for the discussion.

The biggest problems:

a) Selecting a book, we want something at least one or two members have already read to make sure there's a good recommendation. Going by reviews has not worked well, it's better if someone brings the selection to the group because they have some personal stake.

b) Coordinating the schedule - you want to give people enough time to read the book but two months out the calendar is still volatile so often I have people drop out last minute due to meetings being schedule over, frustrating for everyone and apparently people don't want to tell their manager bookclub trumps work meeting.

c) Recruiting new members, we usually have a steady core group but want to beef up our roster to where we don't end up with awkward 2 people meetings.

Some of these issues don't apply with technical/business book meetings since it can be done chapter-by-chapter. We've done that as well and it's easier but usually after two or three chapters people drop off or lose interest in specific ones.

You could argue that your website isn't concerned with some of the above (e.g. people preselect books, then others show up automatically) but Goodreads and others already do the same for free.

How would it be illegal to have an outdated price with a big date of validity attached? Or are you pointing out there should be a year?

Not trying to defend anything here, but that simply sounds unlikely and my example would be supermarket flyers with certain offers that are very often still around here, I don't think just because it's digital it must be destroyed the moment the offer ceases to exist in ANY jurisdiction.

Yes, we are using Circle as a platform and we are paying 99$ each month. We have only 30 spots available, so it will basically cover the cost of the platform itself (if we get all the spots filled).

If you have organised a community, you know it's not only the cost of the platform, it takes time to coordinate, moderate and basically build a community.

The way I've always thought of stuff like this is to offer a free tier and a paid tier. Free tier gets access to most of the stuff and paid access gets you the premium things. You can also do a cheaper tier and premium tier if you're concerned about operational costs.

It's worth trying to work out. People love exchanging money for goods and services. The more you can do for them aside from actually reading the book for them, the better. When other people take care of things, one can relax and enjoy oneself.

Even if you can only do it for 50% of members because of whatever logistical problem, it's worth it. Although it seems it'd be simple enough to email publishers and offer to buy X number of copies of an ebook in the context of a book club.

It's real simple: Give new members an Amazon gift card to purchase the book. You buy the gift card, then send the code. Or, buy a gift card to their local bookstore so they can walk in and buy a physical copy, or they can use the funds to place an online order and have the book shipped through the store.

The best way to get a book club off the ground is to make sure everyone has the book in hand before the discussion starts. "First book on us" is a great way to build momentum, and it lets people know that you're serious about the project.

It’s a personal take, I believe in nowadays tech you can pretty much access anything, anywhere, anytime, and that’s before the whole chatgpt/LLM/generative AI/etc. where you can have a fully customizable assistant at your fingertips at any field. I also believe such communities will eventually be a source of distraction (aka drama) once they get large enough, because we are humans and these types of dynamics are bound to happen. To some, maybe it’s a source of motivation or inspiration as they need that extrinsic motivations.