Show HN: StumbleUpon for books | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: StumbleUpon for books

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37 pointsraimonds26 comments

Fetching books from HN threads is IMO a really good idea, but using the submission title seems to produce completely inaccurate teasers for me. I'd recommend fetching the title from Amazon too, and also somehow weighting the books by comment upvotes.

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions! Book titles would make more sense definitely. But post titles lead to surprising and funny results sometimes.

Very cool idea. I recently spent quite a while paging through HNSearch.com looking for book recommendations.

My recommendation would be to make sure the "Next" button never moves. Some really long titles cause it to get pushed down a bit and that gets annoying when you're clicking on "Next" at a fast rate.

I also agree there needs to be a little more information on the page because of the sometimes-indirect post titles. I find myself hovering the Amazon link to see the name of the book.

Great feedback! I'll try to fix that nasty Next button.

And can you add keyboard navigation too?That'd be supper addictive

Great thought! I will do it!

If I recall, there was a guy who also scraped hn but included movies and other things. It wasn't limited to clicks, he had all the information in lists.

Maybe it was me again with http://www.hnstore.co/

Thank you for that! Somehow I went to a tangent on your site the last time I saw it and came across r/Cyberpunk. I believe you should include subreddit mentions too.

Cool idea! I will look into it!

I don't like how the titles aren't necessarily about the book or what you're going to get.

Sorry about that! I thought getting something unexpected would be more fun. But majority here want to see real book titles so I will look into it.

Finding interesting books to read is a huge problem for me. I have tried Goodreads, but its recommendations are poor. I usually just use random lists to find things to read.

I really like the general idea of something like this, but a way to restrict by category or train it in some way would make it a lot more useful for me.

Very cool. Naturally, scraping out of HN is gonna provide a few wonky teasers, but a great idea nonetheless. Just submitted my book per the site's instructions for kicks http://www.amazon.com/dp/111866146X

Thanks for the kind words!

Fun name. Took me a moment to realize it's a word combination.. but cool. :)

Glad you liked it! Name was one of my concerns.

You need to add an Amazon Associate tag to all these links!

But is it worth it if visits are not in millions?

There are some sites that generate decent Amazon Associates revenue without millions of visitors — it's a question of whether one of the main interactions users expect to make with your site is buying something from Amazon. Considering what you're building, it's worth at least experimenting with. Other booksellers (like Powells) have their own affiliate programs too.

thursdayb, you're shadowbanned (which is a shame, because that was a good comment). Might email pg and see what's up. Your comment history looks benign to me.

That was a good comment indeed! Thanks thursdayb, cheald!

If you could get images for the titles and possibly a short summary, it would be a lot better.

Good idea. But the site needs some polish. Moreover, you should add a thumbnail of the book in question.

A back button would be nice as well.

I think the same. If I miss one I have to start over.

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