Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads (booqsi.com)
Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting.
So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph.
We also felt like it was important for Booqsi to be independent of Amazon; we care about supporting local bookstores, so every book in Booqsi links you to Bookshop.org to purchase that book (not Amazon).
Here are some of my favorite features launched as part of beta:
- A book-focused social feed (finally!)
- Beautifully-rendered custom bookshelves to show off to your friends
- Streamlined book recommendations to friends
- Easily track reading goals and books you've read
And many more...
It's completely free and easy to use, and we would love your feedback as you explore the platform.
196 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadI have stopped using Goodreads already--probably for a couple years now. I found that the only feature I really used was the "To read" bookshelf. And I found that I just replaced it with a specific "To read" list of reminders in my iPhone's Reminders app. For that use case, this seems to work great for me. Can you speak to potentially any features of Booqsi that would be an improvement over my simple / non-book-specific approach?
You're not the first to use their Reminders (or Notes) app for book lists. If you're not interested in the social elements of Booqsi and just want to improve upon your current approach, a couple thoughts come to mind:
1. it's built specifically for books (unlike the Reminders app), so you'll be able to easily search for and add books to your "To read" shelf with the option to then "mark is as read" when you finished it, making it easy to track that aspect of your reading journey as well.
2. if you choose to buy it, it'll link you directly to bookshop.org to purchase it from a local bookstore instead of Amazon.
Now, if you wanted to elevate your experience, I feel like the social aspects of Booqsi is where it shines. For example:
1. if a friend drops you a book recommendation, it'll automatically add that book to your Books Recommended to Me shelf. If you like that book, you can move it to your "to read" shelf, or just go buy it. I've found it makes tracking book recs so much easier.
2. anytime someone in your community mentions a book, it'll come through your feed; you can then easily take action from it by navigating to the book's info page, adding to a shelf, going to purchase it, etc.
Those are just a few that come to mind! Regardless of if you want to use the site independently of others or engage more socially with others, there's something for everyone.
Giving authors tools for self-promotion is also a big deal -- and something many authors actively engage in with Goodreads.
One more thing, that should be higher priority: The ability to add books to the database. There's nothing more frustrating than wanting to add a book to a shelf, and not being able to! (Maybe it's already an option? If so, it's not easy to find.)
Agree on the author-sentiment too. The long-term vision is this to not just be a site for readers, but a site for authors, publishers, bookstores, etc. A true ecosystem. As a reader, you can follow your favorite authors and bookstores and receive updates, but as an author you can engage with your audience and self-promote. A win-win.
We pull all of our data from Google Books currently (so to avoid needing to maintain an internal database right away), so if it's not on Booqsi it's because it's not on Google Books. It's been fairly broad in scale, but we've certainly seen situations where books don't show up. Thanks for the feedback!
Booqsi is specifically not part of Amazon's affiliate program and instead of focused on the local bookstores via bookshop.org, so I'm not an Amazon affiliate expert, but I would imagine that Amazon wouldn't have any issue with a site like this linking users to purchase books from them.
I've been using and loving an alternative, https://www.thestorygraph.com/it has similar vibes to Booqsi and also includes a Goodreads import, AI based recommendations, and some mood-based book tracking (i.e tags like fast-paced, dark, emotional)
It would probably be illegal to crawl Goodreads, if that’s what you’re thinking about?
Yes, I've used StoryGraph as well, but felt like I needed something that provided a few more social features. The book mention feature of the social feed is one of my personal favorites with Booqsi.
Storygraph seems to be attempting something similar with the pair reads, but it feels a bit clunky and isn't there yet.
Please support export of a user's data. I just lost all of my Goodreads data when some system problem of their's deleted all my data. I'm pretty mad about it, but at least I had a data export from eight months ago so not all is lost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503465
1) Why can't I browse the site without an account? Is this temporary for the beta phase or a persistent design choice?
2) Do reviews allow GIFs? (I'm not willing to make an account just to see if existing reviews have gifs, and oddly enough, gifs would be a deal breaker for me).
There are no GIFs.
2). No GIFs. But, noted that GIFs could be a fun add.
We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your community about books, with the underlying motivation that a book recommendation from a friend (or seeing what their favorites are) is inherently more powerful than a random review online.
Having a login and simple profiles that represent your person seemed like the bare minimum for a social platform to function. Also worth noting... we're trying the magic link approach for logins, so a one-time email input is all that's required.
If people weren't able to understand how email worked before signing up to it, you damn be sure that no one would sign up for it. But email is ubiquitous enough today that people don't need to understand how it works before signing up, because they likely already understand it.
But "social media for books" is different. Show me how the feed looks, show of it looks when people are using it. It's likely I either ignore it because I can't understand what it would give me without viewable screenshots about how it works before, or I sign up and land on an empty feed, getting discouraged from even using it because it's so empty when I first arrive.
Showing people how a product works before asking them to sign up is not a big ask, and something vital especially when trying to get people to sign up and commit to a new social network, when there are new ones created everyday.
People just want to see how stuff works before, and it'll take a couple of hours tops to add to the landing page.
Pass.
Why are you more trustworthy than Amazon with my book reading habits?
NOTE: Your IP address for booqsi.com appears to be run on ... AWS ... seems ironic or shady, can't tell which.
> "... having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first place"
There is no evidence to support the claims this person makes that it's not a part of Amazon itself. (I don't believe it it is a part of Amazon either, btw) It's a huge en devour to make a social network and it's got a slick interface and design.
My gut says this is not a one man show (he says "we" alot), they have _legal_ pages on their site (evidence of their priorities?), but no details on who they actually are on their about page, (lowers my trust factor by a lot) unlike a lot of other projects around here.
So, there is more evidence to support skepticism than there is to support carelessly believing some marketing blurb.
(edit: for clarity)
OP, you need to deliver lots of public value to customers who haven't converted yet.
Always remember. "3 free articles a week" isn't you giving your stuff away.
It's marketing that costs you nothing.
Free marketing. Keep repeating it to yourself. Free marketing.
* Dashboard/feed: https://i.imgur.com/bUGZX27.png
* Book page (from search): https://i.imgur.com/9BQK7hF.png
* Bookshelves (adding a book is just a modal on this page): https://i.imgur.com/sHzorJE.png
* "Community": https://i.imgur.com/nzI9FNZ.png
* Profile: https://i.imgur.com/kcxitYb.png
There isn't a lot of content to showcase, but the screenshots on the homepage (at https://www.booqsi.com/) seem to show off each of the currently-available pages. It'd be nice to have some kind of search to see book search result pages for yourself without signing up, but honestly there's not much to see (yet?). You can see for yourself: https://app.booqsi.com/books/9781408865446
What did you use as your source of book data?
On the forum, people would package three related books into quests. A boring example would be a dystopian quest pack with three books about three very different dystopian scenarios.
But the quests people put together were usually more interesting. I remember a "Weird Magic" quest had books with really unconventional magic systems. I found Motherless Brooklyn (detective with Tourette's) in a quest pack of "heroes with issues". Other quest ideas would be evil protagonists, alien first-contact with the wrong guy, and stuff like that. You can often find three books for even the goofiest of quests.
It was a cool way to find new books. And whenever you didn't know what to read next, you'd look at what quests you were still working on and choose among them. Once finished, your completed quest count would increase.
Long append-only lists of genre-related books were never as interesting to me. Quests only having three books made them a fun thing to collect. Maybe there's something fun there that new goodreads competitors can experiment with.
Anyone want this? Can have it up in March
Google form for email! https://forms.gle/myqMroFy2nAJR4YY6 Discord where we can collaborate on it - https://discord.gg/ZwJxNtnKza thanks!
Here's my email: booksforthewise@yahoo.com
Our Instagram where we're building our community (over 50k+ book readers) instagram.com/booksforthewise
-Jeff
thanks!
Maybe I'm just uncreative, or maybe I'm too tempted to always generalize everything, but it seems like as soon as you implement a user log-in system for any sort of interactivity, you would then be tempted to import a book dump into your database, and the next thing you know you're now a Goodreads, Storygraph, Librarything, Booqsi, Bookwyrm, Booksloth, Oku.club, etc. competitor.
After all, most of the magic was in the community users creating and sharing fun quests and the natural curating effect of being able to sort by the most popular quests. And as you can imagine, most quests were generic and bad. "chuck123's sci-fi quest"
It was also fun to see how many quests you started by completing a single quest. Due to overlap, you'd be one book away of completing other quests, usually a book you would have never read otherwise which was part of the fun, and then you'd be another book away from finishing even more quests.
Too bad Goodreads' API is dead, else you could at least build interesting things on top of a "Login with Goodreads" button without recreating an entire platform. Kind of like how health apps on iOS get read/write access to HealthKit instead of all of them building their own pedometer and asking you to constantly reenter and update your data.
Here's my email: booksforthewise@yahoo.com
And our Instagram where we're building our community (over 50k+ book readers) instagram.com/booksforthewise
-Jeff
And I agree 100% with your core sentiment: Goodreads is weirdly low-value.
So I search for "Proust", and the top 8 results are not Proust. Since Proust has one extremely famous book, I thought it would show up, rather than a bunch of different commentary on Proust.
So I finally find the page for In Search Of Lost Time. However, it says none of my friends have read it. Well, of course not - I don't have any Booqsi friends yet. So, there's just nothing I can do on this page.
Next I looked for The Power And The Glory. At least this page has a summary of the book. But, also none of my friends read it, and there's nothing I can do here.
Next, Consilience. Same thing. Basically I search for a book, I get maybe nothing, maybe a summary, and then there's nothing else I can do on that page.
So, I want to like this site, but I'm just finding nothing I can do here.
Personally, I love books but I hate Goodreads. I just don't care that a hundred thousand random people prefer The Twilight Saga Complete Collection to The Death of Ivan Ilych.
I would be really interested to read a well-written paragraph that said, hey, if you like Nabokov and Borges, then you might like this other author. That sort of recommendation is what I occasionally get from reading blogs or tweets from people with a similar literary taste to mine, and it's very useful, I find most books through some sort of recommendation.
Goodreads has this mistaken idea that I care about the average person's opinion of a book. A book is not a can opener. Everyone wants to open a can, everyone opens cans in the same way, everyone appreciates a can opener that successfully opens cans.
Anyway, I hope you do succeed in building a Goodreads alternative, because I would love to spend more time reading about books, reading good books, discussing books, and Goodreads is just not providing that experience.
Your comments about Goodreads and the average random person's opinion is spot on and one of the inspirations for wanting to build something new. I noticed that its my actual friends and family -- not necessarily a random person -- that have the biggest impact on what I read next. A book rec from a friend you respect goes a long way. Booqsi is attempting to harness some of that.
So if I see an interesting book from the Amazon algorithm, the natural thing is to read the reviews, but book reviews are really hard for me to trust. So many people reading the book have a different background, different priorities, different reading ability, they are just looking for something different in a book. So when I read book reviews I simultaneously have to figure out "does this reviewer think like me?" and "is this the sort of book I want to read?" And Amazon or Goodreads book reviews are just too shallow for this.
Over time, though, I start to learn what book recommenders I can trust. Many different sources. Some friends of mine, some bloggers, some book awards, they like the same sort of book I do and I respect their recommendations.
I read a lot of books, though, and I'm not really sure if the "mass reading public" is similar enough to me for my personal product judgment to be relevant to the task of building a Goodreads competitor....
If you're going to demand registration, I think you have to make a good value proposition off the bat. Probably in the form of a specific practical way the site can be used as an application, with the social thing as a bonus. Right now it looks like a site that after I spend a lot of time entering my books into for the dubious benefit of seeing a picture of them on a virtual bookshelf, will be a ghost town abandoned within a year.
Maybe make the database tools very general and flexible, with easy exports and reports, and push that first? I think of Goodreads, Librarything, and for a slightly leftfield comparison Boardgamegeek, as database-first sites that build community on the fact that they provide free, specialized, and sometimes publicly accessible databases to hobbyists.
But I think it's sad that Librarything has such poor marketing and branding that nobody ever thinks "well, there already is a better, cooler replacement for Goodreads, and it doesn't cost anything". It's been around for 17 years, has 2.6 million users, and very few people know about it.
later: According to some pretty stale info on Wikipedia, Abebooks bought 40% of Librarything in 2006, and Amazon bought Abebooks entirely in 2008.
edit: https://blog.librarything.com/2008/08/abebooks-news-the-scoo...
https://www.librarything.com/topic/152033
> At the same time, it's well known that Amazon has an indirect but real stake in LibraryThing—they bought Abebooks, who were our first minority partner. People keep reporting that Amazon has 40%. That's simply not true—it fails to take account of our second funder, Bowker. (I remain the majority; I can't say how the rest divides up.) But this certainly muddies the message. For what it's worth, I want LibraryThing to make more money, and therefore my, Bowker and Amazon's stake to be worth more and more, but with Amazon now holding 100% ownership of BOTH our competitors (Goodreads and Shelfari), we can hardly do so without emphasizing what sets us apart.
I did not know it even existed, I have imported all my books into it and will wean myself of Goodreads.
One of the nice things about it is its lack of decent AI (and they're open about it). They're not trying to hit those kinds of user engagement metrics.
What is your plan for monetization? I’m currently using StoryGraph and it seems it will survive through paid users, but I’m uncertain whether a site like yours will continue very long unless you start monetizing it.
Good luck and I wish you all the success!