Ask HN: What features do you think are missing from Goodreads?
What features do you think for a good book reading community are missing on reddit, 4chan etc?
- First and foremost, protection from review trolls. Goodreads star ratings are influential, impactful, and unreliable.
- A flexible yet coherent system for grouping books. Maybe multiple systems. For instance, I have trouble finding hard sci-fi books because most sci-fi has fantasy elements and hard sci-fi isn't the most popular subgenre. Some books are genre-benders. Sometimes a "subgenre" is better characterized as an intersection. Maybe something tag based, but the tags are categorized.
- I'm not interested in popular reviewers. I'm interested in reviewers who like the things I like.
It is super super hard to make this work financially, where as for Amazon the 370 people they have at Goodreads are a rounding error.
If you want to support what I am doing at Shepherd I'd love some new Founding Members, that is helping me a lot but we are still not break even on monthly costs: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/membership
Off the mark or what?
I am pulling in BISAC data which is the industry marketing for hard science fiction. Its messy, but curious what you think.
I also like Story Graph doing buddy reads. I think that is a cool concept, but not sure how successful it is.
I created Shepherd.com, but I am focused purely on book discovery and exploration, so everything I am doing is around how to find books you will love.
I am trying to develop book recommendation channels so that readers can subscribe to different people they find interesting and keep that type of concept going forward (while helping authors). The subscriptions will be email-based, and the first step toward that goal is launching next month.
For now I ask authors to share 5 books they love around a topic, theme, and mood. Then I connect books in cool ways.
For example, here is our hard sci fi shelf: https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/hard-science-fiction
Genres are hard, as getting data on books is a mess. The industry standards are shit and don't do a good job. So you have to crowdsource data or something.