Just launched a site around better book discovery. Can I get your thoughts?
Crazy week but very happy it is launched and curious what people think :)
I love reading and I am trying to create an online experience that is like wandering through your local bookstore. Along with little notes pointing out great books by people who really know that topic.
For the beta launch, I’ve got a little over 400 book recommendation lists by authors on specific subjects. These are all hand curated.
Here are a few of my favorites:
The Best Books On The Power And Wonder of Mathematics
https://shepherd.com/best-books/power-and-wonder-mathematics
The Best Books On The Meaning Of Life
https://shepherd.com/best-books/meaning-of-life
*Tom is one of my favorite video essayists and worth a watch.
The Best Books For Understanding Human Nature
https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-human-nature
I'd love to hear what you think :)
If you like it I'd love some help on ProductHunt:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/shepherd-discover-amazing-books
Very cool idea. GREAT domain name!
I think overall it's a really pleasant experience. The only thing I would recommend is shorten your line lengths.
Book publishers have known for decades that for, lines of text, the optimal characters per line is between 50-65 (75 at the absolute max). Any shorter and you risk line shift fatigue. Any longer and you diminish the reader's ability to track the next line start when moving from the end of the previous line.
I think it would only make sense to give your target audience (book readers) a similarly optimized reading experience on the site by keeping the typography tidy and easy to read.
Other typographical choices you've made (font pairings, sizes, line-height) are all great!
Thanks Dustin :)
The problem is at 50 to 65 in length you lose a lot of the nuance and magic for what threads those books together. On the SEO side, I do this for the title, but when I looked at chopping those down it feels like you lose some really cool data.
Any ideas or thoughts?
For a page like this: https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-soviet-space-program
Do you feel like the title being two lines is just a real drag on readability?
Let me know your thoughts,
thanks, Ben
I think you may be confusing line lengths with content length.
You don't have to limit the paragraphs to only 55-65 characters, limit the width of the paragraph container so that it returns at 55-65 characters.
I did a quick mockup for you:
Basically all I did was limit the main container column to 720px, and slightly adjusted the h1 and body text sizing. H1 I made slightly smaller (so it stays on one line) and the body text I bumped to 20px.
Ah gotcha, so more like newspaper columns so your eye doesn't have to move so far. Thank you and noted as I keep playing/tweaking.
Correct!
Wow this is great! Much better than Goodreads in terms of UI and info.
I'm just concerned on you can scale this, since the books are hand curated. But seeing the many. Contributors, maybe it won't be much of a problem.
Just a suggestion, maybe it's personal taste, bit the front page could be more tiled and have less text, and you could expand if you wished to. That way is not as daunting at first, even though we're readers, we're lazy humans haha.
User based recommendations is always a good but difficult add on.
All in all, thanks for this!
Thank you for the very kind words :)
Homepage
Good eye, I am working on the front page as I know it is a mess. I think I am going to bring in the tiles I will be using on the related booklist feature instead of the current mess (https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists). Do you like these? Or, what would you add?
Scaling
Ya, it is intense :). I feel pretty good about scaling the curation but it is something I am keeping an eye. I know I can handle 300 a month with the current system. I am going to see if I can get that up to 1,000 a month by the end of the year with some additional help. The backend systems have gotten some big improvements to make this possible in the last few weeks.
Let me know on your thoughts around tiles :)
I do like the mockups, I'd throw a pic of the top book cover to give some hint of what's inside, thus giving a bit of value upfront.
One thing that I have trouble with, is finding books to read outside of my "comfort" zone, so having a/some best books of random sections (or sections of the week) would be awesome.
For scaling, one thing you can do additionally is to crawl the web for good already existing reviews of books, like the well-known https://sive.rs/book, and give them credit, but always keeping the curated stuff as good as possible, because that's where the gold nuggets are.
If you need backend help, I can always take a look and see how I can help.
If I remember anything else, I'll try to come back and suggest.
Great ideas!
I'll get that mocked up and play with it. That could help make that card a little more visual if we include the book.
Ah gotcha, so something like new lists of the week, or top lists of the week, or other ways to bump into things you might not. Would you want that to be via email?
Much appreciated for the offer of help on the backend, I'll keep that in mind :)
Something like that exactly. I guess you can have a newsletter with that of people are interested.
I see that you have a lot more feedback to go through :) good luck!
Very cool collection! I will study it for a long time and I will definitely find a lot of interesting books. Thank you very much for such work!
By the way, do you read fiction? Can you recommend something?
I really like fiction. It helps me recover after work. I wrote several essays at https://eduzaurus.com/free-essay-samples/lord-of-the-flies/ because I really like William Golding now. On this resource, I often help students write assignments and I am glad that I can be useful to other people.
Thanks :), yep, but what are you interested in? What type of fiction?
@bwb Congratulations on the launch. It's clear that a ton of hard work has gone into this and it shows. I'll agree with other folks that your UI and UX are very good. Bookmarked :)
Can I throw in a suggestion? The anchor link in the nav on your index page titled "Discover The Best Books" links to itself. When a visitor is browsing any other page, it works fine to help them get to home, but if I land directly on there - I would expect the link to take me somewhere else. Just a minor suggestion :)
Thanks :)
Yep noted on the anchor text, I get that frustration. I'll see if I can fine-tune on that page as I do have a more improved menu planned for this summer as we add search.
That's awesome. Looking forward to those changes and more. See you around and good luck!
This is really well done and an impressive collection for a beta launch! Upvoted on PH, and will be emailing you.
Love the idea of author experts sharing recommendations for other people's books in their domain.
I would consider changing the logo, the guy in the hat with the shepherd's staff. This product is about book recommendations. If you want an icon with a person in it, then it should be a person showing you a book. Or just an icon with a book in it.
Well the idea is that they are Shepherding books, ie, here are books we recommend on x and they are the Shepherds. Stock logo for now :).
Question: Did you reach out to the different authors for the "recommended by" sections? Otherwise, how did you determine which books they recommend?
Good question, I cold emailed authors who wrote books I loved or that friends loved and asked them to do recommendations around topics they know well. They pick which books they want to recommend (I don't control any of their recommendations beyond a few suggestions on style). Make sense?
Looks great and like the UI.
One nut to crack is SEO. I recently read an interesting article on why no one has made a better Goodreads. Basically it comes down to their dominance in SEO.
If you can somehow get a bit of SEO this could be huge!
Yep, I saw that fantastic article too and chatted with the author (a very smart guy). My goal is to rank for any searches around book topics and I will def be posting updates on my progress. Goodreads doesn't rank as strongly as people think on the long tail, and I think I have a good shot here. We shall see and I'll share what I find out :)
Awesome - let us know how your journey goes!
Very cool idea. It's kind of similar to booksread.by but I like that you also have categories, which makes it easier to find something that you're actually looking for.
Wow, thank you for sharing that site as I love that, beautiful design too :)
Do you have plans for an API?
Not anytime soon, as we are still in a baby stage. Are you trying to do something with a book api? They sure are a mess, I tested a lot but ended up doing my own data for now.
Kind of. It's more a supplementary portion of a larger project I'm working on. I'd love to talk in more detail with you about it via DM or email. Let me know.
Email is great, [email protected], I can share what I tested as I need one for a feature I want to add toward Winter.
Ok, I will take some time this weekend to reach out and properly explain everything. This week has been hectic for me.
No problem, same here, and thank you :)
Really nice UI Ben and definitely something I'd use!
Thanks :), I work with an amazing designer out of Serbia, he is a pleasure to work with. Same for the developer who I am working with on this project. Both are absolute stars.
That's always good bwb!
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I picked it up a long time ago for a good chunk of money, I loved the brand image it gave and knew I'd use it eventually. I was really active in hosting/domains for many years so was always watching for good ones.
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Ya, my frustration with Goodreads was a huge motivation.
We integrate with Amazon now, so when you click the Amazon button you would just have to click to get to the Audible book. I am going to look at how to integrate audible links directly too :).
Would you want recommendations just for audio books as a filter?
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Gotcha, yep this isn't personalized, more recommendations from authors/experts within their field or passion. Have you tried Story Graph? Far better than goodreads for that type of thing :)