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Show HN: A new book notification service I just launched

41 points by acangiano ↗ HN
Hi guys,

yesterday I launched a new book notification service called 'Any new books?': http://anynewbooks.com

The idea is that you enter your email, subscribe to a few categories of your interest, and then you'll receive one weekly email per category with a list of new interesting books that were just released.

The first day was pretty good I think, with many people signing up. Among these, I've already spotted a few key players in our industry (which I take to be a positive sign, of course) and the feedback I've been receiving by email has been very positive so far.

I'm posting this here because I think you may like this service and also because you may have some good advice. I'm particularly interested in hearing suggestions on how to get further traction (I have some plans in the works, but the more the merrier). I really trust this community when it comes to startup advice. :)

Cheers, Antonio

43 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 98.5 ms ] thread
michael_dorfman
What's the business model? Affiliate sales?
acangiano
Yes. For the most part it will be affiliate sales (e.g., Amazon Associates). I will also accept non-obnoxious advertisers/sponsors down the road. If the list becomes big, there may be advertisers interested in placing a small ad in the messages.
Josh0
Wow, thanks. This is a fantastic idea! Finding out about good, new books is actually one of the things that I find really hard to do. Usually I just have to wait to hear about it by word of mouth, which means my information is generally out of date.

Are there any plans for any sort of rating and recommendation engine? For example letting users rate books that they've bought and then recommending new areas of interest based on their ratings or something along those lines? (More difficult, I know...)

acangiano
I plan to approach this incrementally, but it's a clever idea. I'd say that once the list is bigger, a lot of fun new features can be implemented. At this stage, I favored the essentials, trying to get the minimum viable product out there.
Josh0
I totally agree with that approach. Just signed up, and can't wait to start getting messages.

Another interesting idea to consider might be some sort of integration with librarything.com, delicious-monster.com, or something along those lines.

I hope you're, at minimum, collecting some sort of data on how many people click through from the emails to get more information on the books, seems like that could be very useful and help you justify and build more features in the future.

acangiano
Thanks, those are all good suggestions. :)

Yes, the reports give me very specific details about what has been clicked.

ascuttlefish
Looks like a good service. I've signed up. I'm curious, what's the purpose of the Kindle ebook question?
acangiano
Thank you. At some point in the future, I'd like to be able to send/avoid sending some Kindle ebooks in the weekly selection, based on your preference.
ascuttlefish
Ah, gotcha. I like other types of ebooks though! :)
acangiano
At some point I may include an option that allows you to specify the type of ebook you own.
yanowitz
Cool idea.

Feature request: enter a list of authors I like and get notified when a new title is available by any of them.

acangiano
> enter a list of authors I like and get notified when a new title is available by any of them.

I must confess you are not the first person to suggest this. I don't plan to implement it right away, but as the service grows, I'd like to add an "alert" component to it.

kingkilr
Please please please do this :) I have enough books on my queue that I don't need any more ;), but when something from one of my favorite authors pops up I like to grab it.
tyskis
This is something I would like very much as well. Currently I do it manually, by periodically checking if there are any new books out from my favourite authors. This is of course far from perfect, as I tend to miss one every now and then, and it also takes time. Anyone know of a service that does this already?
mshafrir
Looks great! I'll just add that I think there's too much going on in the navigation... moving spotlight, changing colors, and some sort of other effect going on.
nostromo
I must tell you that I find the navigation animation to be very distracting. I think you'd be better off without it at all. Otherwise, appears to be an nice service.
dmix
I'd also add a "How Does it Work" section to the site.
acangiano
Thanks, I'll reduce the number of effects going on. :)
TeHCrAzY
I think you could mitigate some of the irritation by greatly increasing the movement speed of the highlight, and somehow fixing the snap-back that occurs when you move to the right of the bar.
duck
Great idea. One nice feature for down the road might be to send only one email per week with the different categories a user selects combined. I know I have always enjoyed update type emails that do this as it is quicker and easier to scan just one email.
acangiano
Thank you for your suggestion. It's definitely an option that I'd like to implement at some point. I know that some people won't like receiving separate emails, so I'd prefer to provide the option.
jordanmessina
I like the idea, but I feel like some categories need sub-categories, I wouldn't want to know about every Programming book under the sun that came out this week, I'd rather just know of any new Python or Ruby books.

However, your target audience might not need that feature and it would just make the UI messy, so I'm somewhat on the fence about what I think you should do :P

Looks interesting though, keep up the good work.

acangiano
Thank you. The problem with subcategories is that we are talking about new books, rather than just general recommendations. In a given week that are only so many books that are released for a given category which are not obvious duds. The idea is that if you are interested in programming, you subscribe to the category. Then every week you take a look at the email and see if some titles catch your eye. There are some categories that may need to be split though, like Fiction for example.
bruceboughton
I found your categories to be a bit ambiguous. What is the difference between Computers & Internet, Programming, and Professional & Technical, for example? I can guess but then I might be wrong and miss out on the email I wanted. Maybe show sample titles?
acangiano
Good point. What I can do is add an question mark icon next to each category, which will bring a description or a screenshot of one email for that category up.
nsfmc
"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...

mike-cardwell
What's with the "Kindle" option? I have a Sony Reader. I read E-Books. I don't read "Kindle ebooks" whatever they are.
burriko
I assume the site is pulling this data from Amazon, and therefore the list of ebook releases is limited to those released for Kindle.
acangiano
I'm adding other sources to the backend, however yes, Amazon ECS is the main source at the moment. The titles are hand-picked, but I use Amazon's data and a custom algorithm to present me with a decent pool of books to start with.
Vindexus
Cool stuff. How are you getting the data on new books? Do you have a cron job that uses Amazon's API to search for new books? I'm not really familiar with their API so I'm not sure if that makes sense.

Are the categories grabbed from Amazon too?

samratjp
It's pretty neat. The inbox picture isn't the easiest to pick out that it's an indbox - make it look like the normal window view of mail with the split views for easier recognition.

Besides that, the top menu animation is a bit distracting (which you're going to reduce - from your comment above :) And it would help if you had most of the inbox if not all of it showing up without scrolling down a la Apple.com style.

You also have a pretty good search layout, which is nice, but it would benefit more if there were pictures. Personally, I'd die for to have a spotlight like/apple.com search like filtering with tiny thumbnails of books.

As about your next iteration, you could potentially do some collaborative filtering for recommendations. Of course, that's something for the long run and is essentially a non-trivial yet money maker (if you're into that sort of thing).

Dornkirk
Is there any way to make notifications by keyword?

I entered "OpenGL" into the search box to see if any new books were out, apparently there aren't, but can I subscribe to notifications for "OpenGL" or do I just have to select a category ("Programming" in this case). If I have to do that then I'll get a ton of stuff unrelated to my area of interest.

acangiano
The site doesn't offer an alert functionality yet, but it may be included at a later stage.
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kabuks
Amazon used to have a similar notification service, but they killed it. Anybody know why?
edanm
This is a great service. It is pretty close to a project I'm working on myself, although it seems your future plans and direction are quite different. All in all, this is a great case study for me to see if people are interested in this kind of thing.
c0riander
This is a great idea. Would it be possible to include a one or two sentence summary (very short) about each book? Otherwise we're just judging books by their covers...
codebaobab
Have you thought about music? I consume a lot more author-specific music than I do author-specific books. (In other words, while I consume both books and music pretty voraciously, I don't buy books from the same author nearly as often as I buy music from the same band.)
darushimo
This looks great, Antonio. What I'd really like is a feature to subscribe to small ("indy") publishers. This is similar to the "by author" feature mentioned in these comments. I'd guess that this wouldn't be a high demand feature, but by golly, that's exactly what I'd want, so I thought I'd throw in my two cents.
newchimedes
It's looks like a cool service. I'm really curious to see how it does...keep us posted, have you decided how you plan to market the service? Press releases, book clubs, etc?
umen
great stuff can i ask you what hosting do you use ? im asking becausei know there is email limitation sending how did you over come this?
acangiano
I'm using Mailchimp, a third party service provider.