Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books

idreambooks.com

146 pointsrahooligan89 comments

Love, love, LOVE the idea - It's one of those things that I would use every week if it worked.

Critical feedback from a potential fan:

#1 - When looking at best sellers, one of the first things I saw was, "A Dance With Dragons, 29 critic reviews | Published: August 28, 2012" - The "Published" date is obviously for something different than the book (Softcover? Trade Press?) - regardless, for book reviews what's most important is not the publication of the format (I can get that at Amazon in 2 seconds) - but the publication of the _content_

#2 - I wanted to see how Peter Hamilton's books were reviewed (very popular author, so lots of reviews of his work out there), so I typed, "Peter Hamilton" and got 17 hits, but not a single one for Peter Hamilton's books. Typing the same thing in Amazon.com, despite how common the name is, got me a page of hits comprising _only_ the Science Fiction author Peter Hamilton.

In general, it's better to focus on the 99% of what users are looking for than the long tail. Not sure if you just don't have all of the reviews entered here, but the content needs bulking up before you introduce this to the general populace.

Love the idea - I'll check in from month to month to see how it comes along.

Thanks. Our db isn't that big yet. We are adding books & ratings every day though!

Your search is... awkward.

I'm searching for "Count of Monte Cristo" (no quotes), and I get barely-related results (starting from "The Pregnancy Countdown" to "Fifty Shades of Grey" - please tell me that "of" is a stop-word in your search algorithm!).

Sidebar: Is your review aggregation automated or curated?

EDIT

When a cover image is not available, the results are meaningless as you must hover over each coverless result to see the title. I think the text should be always visible for images with no cover:

http://imgur.com/uwnBB

I think that's probably a bug. When the page first loads the results, the overlay w/ the title is visible. It's only once you've moused in and out that the overlay disappears (at leas, that's the case in Chrome).

While visually I really like the design, in terms of usability I'm not entirely sold on it. Book covers can be hard to read (for both the title and the author) and there can be many different cover designs which people may not recognise. I would strongly suggest adding adding the title and author as static text that you can see at all times.

One other point, I don't think the disparity between positive and negative cloud icons is big enough. On Rotten Tomatoes it's crystal clear.

Love the site concept. Have been looking for a site like this for ages. Looking forward to seeing it grow.

Agreed with the search being awkward. I tried searching "end of eternity" with and without quotes. In both cases, A Song of Ice and Fire as well as Fifty Shades of Gray came up [1]. I'm looking for a classic book by Isaac Asimov. For what it's worth, Amazon knows what I'm talking about immediately [2].

On top of the search algorithm being a little wonky, I think your sentiment analysis is a little off, as well. For example, for the book Caine's Law by Matthew Stover, you have the Two Pens and Kirkus reviews as negative, when in fact they were positive reviews.

I would love to see a site like this work--I'd be a constant user, but it's got some work to go before it's usable.

[1]: http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/search?q=%22end+of+eternity%...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=end%20of%20eternity

[3]: http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/232-Caine-s-Law

Small comment: you are using faux bolds on your headers (Bestsellers, Recent in Fiction, Recent in non-Fiction in dark gray along the top.) This is hurting readability, especially since the font is already bold. Essentially, you are applying a low-quality bold (generated by the browser or text rendering layer) to the high-quality bold that was designed by the typographer. This isn't just font wankery, it makes it hard to read the headings.

The easiest way to fix this is remove the bold declaration from your CSS. The text will still be bold, because you are using a bold font.

The other way to fix it is to go into your @font-face declarations for droid sans bold, and change the declared font-weight to be bold. This tells the browser that the font is already bold, and not to make it more bold.

Here's a before and after in FF (latest) on OS X. Faux bold: http://cl.ly/image/3R0B0z1s0A3g. Real bold: http://cl.ly/image/2A1N3w083h47.

Thanks for the comment. The bold is applied again in the css...not ideal. Removing it makes it less heading like though. Can increase the font but not sure if it will suffice.

I've given up and started modifying sites directly via the Stylish plugin, if I must use them, or simply ditching them, if I needn't.

Very cool. One feature that RT has that you don't have yet is the ability to see all reviews by a reviewer/institution.

Actually, being able to see all books by the author would be especially useful. And it's a view more particularly essential than it is for RT (since an author has a more singularly important role in the quality of a work, compared to the actors/studios/directors/writers/producers/financial backing that go behind a successful movie)...being able to see an average for an author's books, or even a sparkline (to see if he/she is going downhill) would add a lot of value with minimal effort.

Related to that: I know it's kind of important to people to see the blurb, which necessitates a multi-column layout for the listed reviews. But I'd rather see it in a tabular format, with Reviewer Name, Date, Rating, and then a long field for 20-30 word blurb. It's easier to see distribution of reviews in a tabular format.

To put a slightly finer point on it: sites like this are incredibly relational. Everything (almost) should be clickable for a collection view.

That's taking it a bit far, eh? Tasteful user interfaces answer relevant questions - not just any question at all.

For sure it's an ideal, but come on, you should be able to click on a reviewer's name to get their other reviews, or an author's name to get their other books, or a date to find other reviews posted at the same time (with its own range functionality), as well as by-publisher, by-review-site, etc.

We will be adding sort/search by author/reviewer as we grow the db.

Good to hear, I was frustrated when searching for a particular author, ie "Robert Jordan" would return results with "Robert" or "Jordan" anywhere in the title or author name.

Also if you search for something like "The X of Y" you'd get results that had nothing but the "the" or "of" in common. :(

We made some changes for the search to work better...just need to deploy.

Firstly, I love the idea. Part of the reason I've stopped reading fiction is because of the unknown quantity to whether it will waste my time — amazon reviews can be hit and miss, and often missing.

http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/19-Moonwalking-With-Einstein reckons that the NYTimes review is negative, but reading it (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-m...) it appears to be positive? How do you work out which are positive and negative?

Also, could you make it possible to blacklist certain reviewers? Is that what the thumbs up and down do, personalising your result? Say, if I went to the review page of 50 shades, and downvoted all the positive reviews, will those reviewers stop counting?

In the case of Moonwalking with Einstein over 70% of critics gave it a positive.

If 7 out of 10 critic reviews are positive, the rating is 70%. We recommend a book if it scores over 70%. More info here: http://idreambooks.com/toread_or_nottoread

Thumbs up/down doesn't personalize yet...

Sorry, I think you misunderstood me, I am specifically referring to the New York Times review of it, which is one of the 4 negative reviews of the book, but if you read it is in actual fact positive. My mistake though, because I accidentally linked the same page twice when I wanted to link this the second time: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-m...

We have a strict set of criteria when rating a review as positive or negative. In general, if the review is even slightly negative we rate it as such...in the case of Moonwalking, NYT expresses a few disappointments about the book. This is to help surface only the very best of books in each genre.

I'm not sure how giving such a binary 'good' or 'bad' to a review is helpful for books. Reviews could be on a continuum (hence the star rating system that many folks use) and calling a review negative just because of a few negative opinions voiced in a review could potentially miss the point of the review.

Any review of sufficient length and thoroughness is likely to include at least some criticism, if for no other reason than the reviewer not wanting to look like a cheerleader. The NYT often selects reviewers with relevant domain knowledge, or who are themselves authors in a related genre. So opinions will be expressed, hobbyhorses ridden, and nits picked, even in glowing reviews.

You should be careful to avoid setting up a business rule that could overemphasize a few negative raisins in a positive pudding.

The idea of a binary positive vs negative is really troubling to me as far as an algorithm goes. It should very much be on that sliding scale that Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes uses--sentiment analysis shouldn't return just a 1 or a 0.

I spent about 10 minutes doing searches and couldn't find anything I was interested in. No Larry Niven, no James Michener, no William Gibson, no Max Brand, no several other authors.

So I tried some current best seller type stuff. No Stephenie Meyer, no Suzanne Collins, no Charlaine Harris. Finally found some Stieg Larsson.

The blue headlines and grey text are hard to read. The little cloud thingie seems odd. Other than that, I like the site. I clicked on links, got the review, from the original site. More content and I'd probably be a user.

Yeah... in the Travel genre, there are exactly two books. Nice idea, but not enough content to be ready for release.

Nice work. I like the idea and it looks like you've executed it really well.

I'm curious how you determine whether a given review is positive or negative, did you use something like http://nltk.org/ ?

I like the concept. But the content is crap. I read a lot of fantasy and scifi. When I went into the list of top rated books in that genre, so many of them are pulp garbage that look like Twilight fan fiction and the like.

And while perhaps this speaks more to my prejudices than anything else - I have a hard time trusting a review aggregator where a bodice ripper has a "100%" rating on the site's home page.

It took me a couple of minutes looking over the homepage to realize that it was organized by genre. I'd recommend making those columns more visually distinct, so you don't offend snobs like myself.

To address patja's concerns - it looks like you've got some young adult fantasy/scifi mixed in with normal fantasy/scifi. Separate those out, and you'll likely get a better response from fans of the genre.

Also - this looks quite exciting. It's amazing how few effective tools there are out there for finding my next book. Thanks for making another!

I have to agree with this; I like the site, but a quick search for a few books that sprung to mind turned up either a pile of irrelevant results (as someone said above, sort out your stopwords; if I search for "The Gunslinger", "The Girl who Kicked the Hornets Nest" is not relevant) or nothing at all once I started trying distinctive title (Cryptonomicon, Accelerando). I'm keen for someone to do a better job on book recommendations for me, but I think this needs a lot of improvement before it'll do the trick.

The scorings are terrible. Rottentomatoes is fairly reliable for getting solid recommendations as a cinephile, but this site is giving high marks for what is clearly crap.

Maybe there just aren't enough book critics, or you're not aggregating them all, or you aren't selecting for the top critics like rottentomatoes.

random honest critical 5 minute feedback:

The reviews are below the fold on my 1050px height. I wondered what was so special about the site before randomly scrolling.

The justified text with the font for the description is hard to read and ugly.

Encoding issues in http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/140-Drift ? Lots of issues on other entries too. Did you scrape other sites for this, not using a legal and well-formed source...?

Thumb-up/-down icons are pretty much not disginguishable for me. Looked like rotated stars on first glance.

The "overall rating" is not intuitive, I only noticed it when I checked what else was on the page. Rottentomatoes is not better for either though, I always have to think what they might mean before I get it (the symbols).

I actually love this, found myself unconsciously clicking through on a few books to learn more. Sometimes all I want is a simple browsing experience to spark my interest and take me down one path or another and I feel like this provides it. Keep on keep'n on!

You need to put in some form of CTA for purchase of said books.

I kept looking for the Amazon link to check the pricing and other relevant metadata.

I kept looking for the same but the closest action was to add to a reading list.

OP, also check out Amazon's affiliate program.

I think what makes RottenTomatoes' rating system pretty good is their clear indication of 'good' and 'bad': A fresh tomato and a rotten tomato.

The clouds on this website aren't bad, but I didn't even realize they were there for a few minutes while I looked over the book covers. They blended into the background and didn't instantly provide a positive or negative connotation.

Since the site's name is 'I Dream Books', perhaps a nice fluffy pillow represents a good book. Or a dream bubble with a happy face. Perhaps the badly reviewed books get a dream bubble that's bursting, or has a nightmare inside.

Fantastic, just sent the link to like 5 people. There is definitely a need for this.

That being said I don't love the cloud icons. Also the layout of the social media icons when viewing a book is ugly.

I predict tremendous success.

With book search, you need to put exact titles before more popular matches. Amazon used to get this wrong, they don't any more. A telling example is "We" by Zamyatin - a classic, but there are many more recent big sellers with that word in the title, so if exact match is not prioritised, you plain can't find it if you can't remember the guys name. I can't tell if you've got this right - maybe your database isn't big enough for it to matter yet.

Beautiful and useful website that I look forward to come back to. I, however, thought that the "RottenTomatoes for Books" was Amazon. In what is this site different?

Rotten Tomatoes aggregates reviews from several different sources to determine a final score. Amazon mainly just employs user reviews.

Amazon is user reviews only. We like RottenTomatoes aggregate from professional critics like NYTimes & select bloggers to create a book recommendation of higher quality.

Amazon just compiles user reviews, not publisher reviews. Or am I missing out on something?

One difference I notice is that RottenTomatoes uses color more effectively. Looking at their homepage I see the red and green tomato icons and instantly see which movies are highly/poorly rated. The blue and gray clouds here don't contrast as much and it took me a second to even realize what was supposed to indicate good or bad. Great idea, though and a good start. Best of luck.

The column layout is confusing because there's no real separation between the columns. My natural instinct is to read from left to right.

Love the aesthetics.

most def...we need to differentiate them better.

Really nice! I love the concept.

Can you make the slider (move me) and the category names (bestsellers, recent-in-fiction etc..) a fixed/floating bar on the page? As I scroll below / load more to view more books, I sometimes forget what category I am looking at and if I need to switch to another one.

Nice UI!

Two minor comments:

1) Sometimes the same book shows up in different columns (e.g. Bestsellers and Recent Fiction). This feels redundant (and possibly unintentional?)

2) There's a Sign Up link. What does signing up do? Is it to write reviews? Subscribe to new books? Something else?

The redundancy is unintentional...need to fix. If you sign up, you get to add books to your 'Reading List' (link under book show page image), enter giveaways and receive a newsletter with top rated books. We plan on adding more features...

Sounds great; just signed up. You should advertise the benefits on your Sign Up page (and/or homepage).

Also, Amazon links would be great. You got me interested in a few books, and I'm ready to buy them. The site should definitely get an affiliate fee for that.

You know what I like about books? They're printed using black ink on white pages. I have to believe that other readers prefer this high contrast approach or we'd see more variations after centuries of printing. Do your visitors a favor and use black text for your main content. The light grey on white surrounded by light grey makes me reach for my glasses, then I realize I'm already wearing them.

Other than that, I really like the site and added it to my bookmarks. I would like to see the number of reviews without having to hover over the cover, though. It helps put the score in perspective.

Books are constrained as much by medium as readability. If you want the book printed cheaply, you're relegated to black text on an off-white background. Also, there's a big difference between text on a back-lit display and text on a page.

I think dark gray text is a good choice for text on computers.

What the dark grey (it isn't really super dark) text actually achieves here is to allow your attention to be drawn to the pictures of book covers.

This, of course, makes the site prettier, because book covers are colorful.

Personally though, I'd rather just have a list of [book name - author(s)]

I love it. I looked into doing this a while back with one portion of the business model being Amazon affiliate sales; you should be doing that. Not only is it good for you ($$$) as a user I want it too. Nice job!

Looks nice. Is it possible to have separate categories for Science Fiction and Fantasy?

EDIT: Also, you should put the author's name wherever the title is displayed. (eg. in the subgenre pages)

Didn't think you could get more granular than SFF. We tried to group genres together for simplicity. But some users don't seem to be liking that. All genres/categories are currently listed in the dropdown in the header.

The dropdown doesn't have Fiction, which was surprising since that's what I went looking for first. Also, when I figured out that I could click on the "Recent Fiction" heading on the homepage, I was disappointed to see that there was no way to filter down to Literary Fiction, the way most publishers do. Otherwise, all the top items are mass market fiction, which is a very different genre.

I never understood review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and the like. Don't sites like Amazon, where you can actually buy the product, already accomplish this? Unless you have actual authors or news critics writing critiques for a book, there isn't much that makes it different from sites where you can buy the product.

Anyway, why no technical literature section? Why isn't there a genre on text books? Novels are fine, but I like learning something when I read.

On Rotten Tomatoes they do have actual news critics writing critiques. That's the whole point of the site. It's an aggregator for critical reviews of movies.

I think that this site is doing something similar.

Might as well just forget about a technical section then.

There are quite a few book sites providing good discoverability combined with community, combined with curated selections, etc. etc.

You've added a nice design, but the categorization of the books is weak as is the selection itself. I looked at History, which seems to be comprised of 'historical fiction' and I looked for "Tony Judt" who was a significant recently published historian but is not represented.

Can you list them? The one I'm familiar with is Goodreads, but if there are others, I'm interested.

http://www.librarything.com is another that's quite popular.

Aside from Goodreads, my list includes:

http://www.librarything.com/ http://www.shelfari.com/ http://49thshelf.com/ http://openbooktoronto.com/ http://www.filedbyauthor.com http://www.thecopia.com/home/index.html http://www.booksprouts.com/ http://www.bookglutton.com/ http://weread.com

You'll note that some of these are dead or dying, which leads me to the small point that I'd make: creating a book site is pretty easy: the audience likes print-media and there are rafts of digitized content available, but getting a site to sustain is hard.

I almost feel like this doesn't matter because none really stand out. Grabbing mind share as "the rotten tomatoes for books" I feel like is ripe for the taking

This would be awesome if i could set personal preference for the review sources. I really don't care what Yahoo voices or some of the other 'critics' think but you are bound to have some reliable critics in there that i do care about.

Maybe even more so than for movies readers tend have more in common with some critics then others and the 'meta' opinion is just not that interesting.

Really cool idea. As you grow you should definitely keep news papers in mind as a possible acquirer. Best of luck!

I love this idea and I have bookmarked your website. Well done, I will keep on checking your website!

This is NICE. Really. If only it had more titles... Also, think about foreign, not-yet-translated-to-English books. For example, there are fabulous SF books in Polish (not just by Lem, and not just SF, actually...) which should be there.

Interesting but lacks way too much content still. I could not find Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Brent Weeks, etc. Every Fantasy author I tried that did not have an HBO series currently did not come back..

Just a tip: the confirmation email went straight to my spam folder (with a very high spam rating). You might want to think about using something like mailgun or sendgrid for better deliverability...

oh no. what email service was it (yahoomail?)...dont forget to unspam it!

I am currently working on something similar, not related to books though. Thanks for the inspiration provided by your site and the comments on here, HN is once again very helpful.

Searched a couple books, found none:

2666 (none found), Vanished Kingdoms (none found), Twilight War: After the Fall (tried 'twilight war' and 'after the fall', each gave unrelated results).

Get in touch if you are interested a better domain name, I've got bookjury that may need a new home -- despite a large % of the code being done. :)

This is well-executed, but I thought those were happy/sad little pieces of poo for a little while and I'm not exactly inattentive.

Seems like search tool needs some work. I can't find books that I am looking for 3 out of 3.

Nice --- really like the layout

Sounds cool. But where are all the books?

No Hemingway, Vonnegut, Faulkner, Kerouac, Fitzgerald.

Why no classics?

I know, I'm dying to know what snarky sophomoric Internet dweebs think about Cat's Cradle rather than just read it for myself. :)

Please, add OpenID login.

Needs a new name. Otherwise, terrific.

Great idea!

cough Goodreads. Already has network effects going for it, and a very vibrant author community. It does pretty much what all the comments on this HN page suggest you should add/change.

Also, your site took almost 5 minutes to load. That is simply unacceptable.

We focus on critic reviews to create a recommendation of higher quality (they don't do critic reviews).

Ah yes, I can see that now that the site loads in reasonable time.

There's a problem with "critic" reviews, at least from where I'm sitting: critics don't review anything that's not backed by a huge publisher, effectively locking out all of the small-time authors who might actually have something good.

For example, I was interviewed about my book for School Library Journal, but the book reviewer side of the house refuse to even consider it for a proper book review.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120724_PJ_YQW/

Slow as hell, but far from 5 minutes.

Goodreads is nothing like this site.

Good stuff.

Can you please make the text darker - I suffer from some sight problems which make grey on grey quite hard for me to read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com