Bookself
The Social Reading App
Bookself.app is now live on ProductHunt!
https://producthunt.com/posts/bookself
Hopefully we get a lot of great feedback to guide or next stages of developing our product.
We are currently looking into two product directions:
- Expanding in-app premium audiobook/ebook content
- Building out stronger social/discussion/book club functionality with live chat features
Curious to hear thoughts from you all on this and on the app in general - encourage you to post any questions or feedback you might have :)
Me and our web dev intern just launched online chat rooms for all books in the world, available at https://bookself.app/chats. We hope that the chat will help readers all over to get more value out of their reading by connecting them to all other people reading the same book. Over time, we want to host live events like author Q&As or chapter readings in the channels to bring readers closer to authors in a personal way.
We were really inspired by the chat rooms of the interest community app amino and took a lot of inspiration from there.
Now we need to make sure readers find their way into the chats and fill them with useful materials, links and discussions. It is for sure a big challenge to get live discussions going so let us know if you have ideas for how to make this feature better.
4 Comments
Nice! Just up voted you on PH. I've wanted to build or find a competitor to Goodreads for a couple of years now. Glad you took it on. I'll be downloading it shortly.
How are you doing the "Discover" page on your site? Are you pushing stuff into an analytics engine or just querying your database? I need to do something similar in a different space.
Thanks Joe! Let me know your thoughts on it.
For discover, before you have a large amount of user data to base your recommendations on, I would generally do a lot of manual curation (lots of tedious work), write some simple ranking heuristic for database queries, rely on open API:s or use social recommendations.
Just downloaded now and am checking it out.
A couple of things.
I'm using an Android, it was weird that I can't use Google to login even though you support other social providers.
I'd like to know more information during the onboarding about why you're asking for information. I'm more of a ask it when you need it school of UI design.
I signed up via email. Asking for a photo and not allowing me to skip during on boarding was a hurdle. I now need to take a crappy selfie or try to hunt down a picture.
Also, the photos don't seem to be working on the latest version of Android. I can't get passed the add profile photo.