Ask HN: Any interest in a startup book review site?

(Treat this as a customer discovery phase)

After searching for some non-trivial amount of time I have yet to find a good review site/blog that caters to books of interest to the start up community. Since we're always strapped for time, I wonder whether it would help to create a site that would serve as a hub for these book reviews.

The core value here isn't just the reviews themselves but other related resources - TED talks, slides, HN discussion threads, case studies, links to "I used the advice in this book and this was my experience" articles, etc.

A peripheral value here is this site/blog would be indexed, categorized and of course searchable.

8 comments

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revorad 15y ago ↗

http://hn-books.com is on the same lines.

prassarkar 15y ago ↗

Thanks, I hadn't come across that in my search.

That site seems to solve the problem of finding book recommendations in a way that's easily filtered/sorted. I like the fact that it lists additional versions (ebook, pdf, etc.) of the book.

My thoughts were that the community might want to read reviews from a startup-oriented individual rather than the default synopsis from the book's publisher. I also imagined that multiple reviewers could review the same book (either on the hub site or their own blog).

revorad 15y ago ↗

DanielBMarkham, who runs hn books does write reviews as well. Letting users review would probably be a nice addition.

Since you are going down the lean path, presumably you want to make money from this. How will you do that?

prassarkar 15y ago ↗

I wasn't exactly looking to make it a business but enough money to cover operational costs. The revenue could be a mix of affiliate links + Adsense (kept to a minimal).

The focus here is to create a community-focused treasure trove of startup knowledge rather than a page-view focused content site.

JoachimSchipper 15y ago ↗

We already have hn-books.com and, IIRC, at least one competitor.

The transparent commerciality (bit.ly -> Amazon affiliate links) turns me off, but others may think otherwise.

neuroelectronic 15y ago ↗

Yeah, not sure why people have objection to this. It's not like they are affected. Sure, it reveals a motivation that otherwise might not be there, but everyone has hidden motivations.

droz 15y ago ↗

http://www.goodreads.com/ already exists. It simply lacks a strong HN-focused community. As others pointed out, we also have hn-books.com.

swanson 15y ago ↗

http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/learning-python-3rd-edition/...

http://bibliotechnical.com/books/learning-python

I made the latter; the problem I ran into was generating quality reviews and related information. I found it was going to take a lot of manual curation to get good results.

HN is also a tough crowd for this kind of project, I think you would be more profitable trying to optimize for people searching for 'java book' instead of those looking for the 'best java book given that I know how to program and know these other languages'.