Show IH: Community-based short-lists of books
Hello, IH! Last year I fell in love with books. Nowadays I try to read one book a week, and there is one problem for me - I can’t find what to read next. There are various list/ratings of books on the internet, but mostly they have one common issue - too match distraction from their real goal. I don’t want to read book-size article just to humbly find my next book.
But community can solve this problem. Yes, you can help find my next read. And I can help find you next read. And we can share it all together and get busy with reading :). This is how www.threebook.co is started. Currently it’s in MVP state.
My plan is to add support of tags/vibes for threebooks and be more social - for example, wide twitter integration with authorization, retweets, likes and shares.
I would be really happy to hear your feedback!
congrats on shipping an mvp! i think i understand what you're going for here and if it is what i'm thinking of, it's something i would definitely like to see. at the moment i'm manually creating lists like this in a spreadsheet from various sources like yours (IH, HN, Bill Gates reading list, etc). i like these kinds of lists because the books might be very different from my interests but someone else is vouching for them and has organized them for me. is that what you're thinking or am i totally off?
my first impression is that the page is lacking any details on what the site is/how to use it/where the data comes from. if i had come across this website without your IH post and description i would really have no idea what i was looking at. luckily you already described what you're aiming for in this post and you can probably condense it and have a nice and short description to put at the top of your site.
"playlists for books"
i'm seeing something like what spotify does with playlists. users can create and share playlists and spotify also has curated playlists, which have a central theme or mood like "beats to work to".
you have an emphasis on 3 books in each list but i'm envisioning something similar where this site becomes a place to share books curated by people instead of a recommendation algorithm
Yeah! I'm not the only one crazy person on this planet that thinks in that direction, thank you for confirmation! :)
i realized immediately after posting this that you have an about page which gives some kind of description! i think it should be made way more visible though (maybe a "What is this site?" link in the header instead of in a dropdown).
First of all, thanks for the great feedback!
Yes, you get the idea right! And yes, I agree that currently is hard to say what is really happening on the site. I launched project in that state mostly to share it on IH and gather feedback. I'll try to be more clear and find the place on the site to explain what is going on :)
Nice job shipping!
Some quick feedback from me is to work on design hierarchy and separating elements. Pairing different fonts together could help with that - show a difference between the title, the date, who posted it, and the actual books. I would agree with @choochoo in that it is lack details on what I am supposed to do on the site. Also the About is tucked away under the three dots which seem nice, but the first time I glanced at the page, I actually didn't notice they were there so I couldn't navigate around anywhere. Some actions buttons of "Create your own list" or "Add your books" that are quick and easy to get to could help increase the number of threebooks present.
Other thoughts, you could maybe throw in the book covers or link to book on Amazon.
Hi Kevin, thank you for feedback! It really means a lot for me.
I believe that most of threebook visitor doesn't event get that they have ability to create threebooks themselves, because I placed the button in too deep!