Ask HN: What business can I create around avid readers and book lovers?

A woot or massdrop like site which allows huge discounts on popular books.

This is going to sound nuts, but I think people are missing bookstores, something tangible, and the thrill of exploration. For avid readers and such there are places like GoodReads, but I've never found anything that helps me discover new books. I generally will surf Amazon looking at covers and titles, then sometimes look at a few to see if they would be interesting. If you could find a way to help people explore and find books easier would be really fantastic.

Netflix or Pandora for books?

Seems like you're competing directly with GoodReads, yet without the social network element, and as such I'd expect you'll have a hard time. I don't know how Goodreads makes money, but I'd guess some combination of 1) amazon/other affiliate links (maybe?) 2) sponsorships.

But I can't imagine you'd ever get the kind of growth GR has gotten without the social element, because it keeps people coming back to the site.

So my question for you is: what value are you offering? If it's just "organizing my library," then you'd need to 1) find pain points surrounding library organization that are so difficult that people will pay to make them easier, and/or 2) come up with some other novel features that also do 1).

So, in other words: What problem are you solving? Who has this problem so bad they'll be willing to pay for it? How does your app solve the problem better than anyone else?

You can monetize your site by adding advertising, affiliate links, finding a sponsor, subscriptions or selling stuff directly. But as you know high traffic is the key to success with all of them. So, you have to work to increase traffic. That should be your goal. Monetizing comes after that.

Another possibility is to make it your show piece. You can use it to showcase your talent and therefore increase your potential salary. This is your best bet for now. Ask yourself, "How does this site highlight my talens?" That will get you some immediate benefits.

This is the criticism I've heard made against Apple's reliance on analog to inform its design of digital responses to notepads, etc. I think you'll stand a better chance of competing against Goodreads and thus finding it easier to monetize by thinking about a unique value that only a digital solution can provide. One idea for a premium offering would be a curated list/book club with a particular figurehead people like/vote for.

I hate to say this, but the startup graveyard has a really huge section filled with every company who has tried to do this kind of thing. you feel like there should be a way to improve on something that people are already passionate about, and that would naturally lead to high adoption. But, a lot of great attempts have just never gotten peoples' attention.

What's more, all the things that obviously would make money are probably already saturated by something that Amazon does.

It's a real shame.

Netflix for physical books.

Accurate book recommendations - not what's popular, not something in the same genre as I've read, not by the same author I've read but something I'd actually want to read.

I think the reason this hasn't been done is that (like movies and music) books are so complex that it's hard to tell what someone liked about one book or disliked about another book, so it's hard to know what other books would have that same feature.

Which is why I think ML would be perfect for this - it's good at things like extracting common features, you just has to create one that can read and comprehend novels :)