Nadia is an amazing speaker. Look up her other talks. You won’t regret it. She blends technical info with an interesting story/mystery in a very thoughtful and well delivered package.
In case you ever seriously consider it, I suggest doing it with RubyMine. It rekindled my passion for programming with its thoughtful suggestions and magic-like refactoring options. Helped a lot to learn the language, and to convert the code, and so my thought process, to be more like how Ruby does things.
Solidifying my dislike of Goodreads, I got my “year in books” email from them today and the first thing that loaded, at the top of the email, is an ad. For pillow cases.
Once you're #1 on Google searches for half of the published corpus of humanity you stop caring about little things like that... Surprised storygraph even has that many users when they're nowhere on Google when I search books.
It’s cyclical. Once the StoryGraphs and Hardcovers of today are big enough to be not bothered about some users with refined UX taste they’d do the same. This repeats.
Nadia has a couple of people working with her as well - Rob does some stuff, and Abby is their Head Librarian (or whatever similar title, she's effectively an all-around assistant that runs their Librarian Corps in addition to doing a few other things).
Hardcover is similarly a 3 person team - one primary Dev (Adam, Founder and Lead Dev), one primary UI/ UX guy (Ste, Lead Designer), and one primary data guy (myself, Head Librarian, also runs our Librarian Corps).
Nadia is awesome, don't get me wrong. What they've done over there is truly impressive and you'll never hear me say otherwise. Hell, I'm a paying supporter and librarian over there, I think they do such great work.
But I do think that what we've got going on at Hardcover is even better, and I'll stand by that too. :)
Excited to hear about Hardcover! I like StoryGraph but the lack of API frustrates me - I want to be able to sync back to my general notes store (Obsidian). Hopefully Hardcover works better with that.
Which is funny, StoryGraph is a Ruby on Rails app, exposing an API is a doable thing, which leads me to believe it is not a priority or a purposeful design decision.
I simply don't understand how she codes the app and writes the newsletter and does social media marketing for StoryGraph and flies all over the world to do keynotes at ruby conferences. I'm very impressed.
Looks like a pretty cool app! "Amazon-free Goodreads" is a pretty good pitch. I'm curious how freemium model works out for them though, I could imagine a lot of people thinking the free version is good enough for them.
I think they do around $500k+ a year based on the numbers they have shared in a few spots. The new giveaway platform for authors should help jump that revenue up too.
I am curious of more about the business as well, but I imagine even a very small proportion of paying users could be sufficient to maintain a 3-people team with that scale
I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list.
Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.
If you have an ISBN you can also check Worldcat, but at scale it's also probably not free. And if you're working with anything that might have an academic slant, Crossref can be useful.
Book metadata is very challenging. Even the publishers of said books are pretty bad at delivering good metadata.
https://openlibrary.org/ has a pretty good set of data and a decent API. You can mix and match too, since openlibraries covers kinda suck half the time.
It's alright. I would use it for a tool where the most important part is having a more-or-less accurate author <-> title <-> ISBN mapping, but not for anything where I need precise bibliographic metadata.
I just want to +1 the recommendation for StoryGraph. I used Goodreads for a decade but got frustrated at how little Amazon invested in it. Plus the review culture was getting toxic. Took me an hour or two to migrate all of my books over.
StoryGraph isn’t necessarily better than Goodreads but it’s definitely just as good and it’s great to support software not owned by Amazon. They may own e-books but they don’t have to own reading.
I tried using this but it was too onerous to import my existing list of books I’ve read (1000+). So I gave up after a bit. I usually don’t really have trouble finding books to read anyway.
BTW my library (and probably yours too) has a free service where librarians will actually recommend books for you based on other books you liked or other criteria. I found those recommendations to be very good.
Readit News
Here’s a recent one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pOW4vepSX8g&pp=ygUOTmFkaWEgT2R...
I’ve also found Hardcover.app, which I quite like. It has an API and a slightly more refined UI, but it’s clearly more than one person working on it.
Of course, if your focus is book clubs, Fable is likely the app for you
Folks, don’t do that
Nadia has a couple of people working with her as well - Rob does some stuff, and Abby is their Head Librarian (or whatever similar title, she's effectively an all-around assistant that runs their Librarian Corps in addition to doing a few other things).
Hardcover is similarly a 3 person team - one primary Dev (Adam, Founder and Lead Dev), one primary UI/ UX guy (Ste, Lead Designer), and one primary data guy (myself, Head Librarian, also runs our Librarian Corps).
Nadia is awesome, don't get me wrong. What they've done over there is truly impressive and you'll never hear me say otherwise. Hell, I'm a paying supporter and librarian over there, I think they do such great work.
But I do think that what we've got going on at Hardcover is even better, and I'll stand by that too. :)
StoryGraph now claims over 3 million.
Hardcover currently has 20K - and yes, a lot of those are fantasy based readers.
That just means it is easier for other readers to come in and potentially become the new largest user group. :)
End of year is a big time for her as people setup reading goals for the year I think. My wife is now using it.
I wouldn't have guessed a book site would be so seasonal.
https://corecursive.com/the-story-graph-with-nadia-odunayo/
i just feel really behind on my book reading :/ havent read a good book in like a year.
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I use Nielsen's API, but the data is pretty rough, and you have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. Plus, the archaic industry standards around genre are hard to translate to what readers use - https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list.
Ingrams and Bowker are the other big metadata providers. Ingram's is good but expensive, but the data faces the same issues.
Book metadata is very challenging. Even the publishers of said books are pretty bad at delivering good metadata.
I imagine it complements or my even supersede tags.
(Admit I haven’t looked at all the sites people are mentioning in the comments yet- lots of good leads!)
https://www.bisg.org/fiction
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StoryGraph isn’t necessarily better than Goodreads but it’s definitely just as good and it’s great to support software not owned by Amazon. They may own e-books but they don’t have to own reading.
I’ve been building an app specifically to help me manage the ebooks that I own
> I’ve been building an app
Most people live in a world where they don’t build their own ebook software. I think you actually do know this.
BTW my library (and probably yours too) has a free service where librarians will actually recommend books for you based on other books you liked or other criteria. I found those recommendations to be very good.
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