Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online (libramatic.com)
My story:
I founded this a couple of years ago because my school (I was 11/12 at the time) had recently purchased a library system which was horrible and ugly. I thought it could be made much better, so I coded for months on end to get this product working.
I submitted this to a TV competition on national TV and got the opportunity to pitch this product in front of 500,000 viewers. I received a bursary of €2,000 from the show and used that money to grow the business.
Currently the business is thriving and is growing rapidly.
I'd really appreciate any feedback you might have.
Thanks,
Shane
42 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadHowever, how does this integrate with existing user's ebook libraries?
At the moment it is targeted towards physical book collections, but we're currently working hard on eBook integration.
I founded this a couple of years ago because my school (I was 11/12 at the time) had recently purchased a library system which was horrible and ugly. I thought it could be made much better, so I coded for months on end to get this product working.
I submitted this to a TV competition on national TV and got the opportunity to pitch this product in front of 500,000 viewers. I received a bursary of €2,000 from the show and used that money to grow the business.
Currently the business is thriving and is growing rapidly.
I'd really appreciate any feedback you might have.
Thanks,
Shane
Sometimes worse is better. Specialised applications can't beat generalised ones or tools to build what you want.
I founded this a couple of years ago because my school (I was 11/12 at the time) had recently purchased a library system which was horrible and ugly. I thought it could be made much better, so I coded for months on end to get this product working.
I submitted this to a TV competition on national TV and got the opportunity to pitch this product in front of 500,000 viewers. I received a bursary of €2,000 from the show and used that money to grow the business.
Currently the business is thriving and is growing rapidly.
I'd really appreciate any feedback you might have.
Thanks, Shane
> WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy.
You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused?
> Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month
I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles.
This price point just makes this a default no go. It would take her a lot of time and effort, serious investment, to catalogue all of her books.
The primary use-case is for insurance, and a secondary use-case would be to generate bibliographical entries for her papers and work.
Both scenarios are seldom-access scenarios, and 30 EUR per month seems very excessive.
You probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet. Which has virtually no ongoing cost and can be backed up and shared easily, and Google Docs spreadsheet even means it can be managed online easily.
The only bit of value is to reduce the time to catalogue, the process of scanning the ISBN and resolving the book details from that.
Have you considered one-off pricing based on # of ISBN lookups and then a very low storage price... 30 EUR per 1,000 ISBN lookups, 10 EUR per year storage per 1,000 books.
And finally... is the ISBN database you're using a national one, or a global one? Of course ISBN is global, but some catalogues of data are country specific.
We validate ISBNs on our automated cataloguing feature.
--
I definitely think that would be a sensible pricing model. I'll certainly look into it. Thanks for the suggestion :-)
Send me an email at shane@libramatic.com and I'll see if I can sort something out.
--
We use a combination of international book databases and have a 98.5% accuracy rate.
I've written a version of this app for my own purposes three times. Then goodreads came along. I think they are the main competitor to this sort of software right now.
I guess the real question is: Who is this aimed at?
My girlfriend and her vast library is very likely not to be the most common use-case.
I used it to catalog about 600 books and was not amazed but it was probably the best free solution I have tried.
The issue for the hobbyist developer is that the libraries to do the barcode scan on the iPhone cost money. Rolling your own is a pretty big undertaking for a niche app like this. Thus all the apps are about the same level of suck.
(https://www.librarything.com/)
Hold on, by "storage" we are just talking about a list of ISBNs linked to a user account? Or am I missing something?
And storage is to store and manage the database (whether manually entered or ISBN looked-up).
The first (and huge) perception of value is "spare me the hours and days of typing all this junk in".
The second (and lower) perception of value is "let me access my library the way I want, any time I want".
Storage is a cheap thing, and of lower perceived value if seldom accessed (insurance scenario).
Building the catalogue is where the time saved equates into high value.
For Mac users, the competiton is Delicious Library (http://delicious-monster.com/) for a one-time $25. Yes, that's not 'online', but is 'online' worth $300+ per year? Not to me, and I doubt I am an exception.
And yes, a library could input 1M books. For that, $30/month is nothing. However, I suspect they would want features such as the ability to add metadata such as a shelf number. They also would want to integrate this into their accounting system.
So, to me, this looks like a product that is too big for consumers and (still?) too small for professional librarians.
> Libramatic retrieves book information such as it's cover art, title, author, publisher and an even abstract automatically based just on it's ISBN code.
Both its here should be its, not it's. This is something that will make large portions of your target audience twitch.
Is my data exportable? If I sign up for a month, and scan all my books in, can I then take my data and not pay anymore?
How did you arrive at the price points? I'd be interested[1] except I have more than 1,000 books, but I'm not going to pay €30 per month.
Good luck though!
Exactly, this is for literrate people!
* Scanning ISBNs had a failure rate of at least fifteen percent, including finding the wrong title, or no match at all.
* Many of my books did not have ISBNs. For these, using the Library of Congress number often worked, but you have to open the book, find the number, and keyboard it.
* About one in twenty of the books had to be completely entered by hand.
* Using multiple lookup services helped, but only to a degree.
I got sick of it after a couple thousand books, and never even got to the paperbacks.
I should add: Thirty clams a month is insane (I just saw the pricing). I'd never, ever pay that in rental -- I might pay up to twice that /once/ for a well-written app which stored its index in a place that I controlled.
A good FAQ to add: What's your security story? I'm putting an inventory of potentially valuable stuff into your site, how do you ensure it's not going to leak?
2. Love the design. B+/A- from an unreasonable grader who hates every website he sees. The blue-green-blue content flow is especially smart. There are a few small things I really think you should change, but they're perception-small, not code-small; and since you're early on, we'll pass on them.
* Nice font choice - readability could be better though. Backburner. But good job on the sizing and justification.
* Perfectly done job of setting the "class picture" of apps on devices just so, so that the eye expects more content underneath and wants to scroll down.
* Green is the best section. Hits on all cylinders content-wise and really sells your product well and sells it quick. The value-add is made very obvious.
* Great understanding of "content funnel" on a single page - blue1: BAM, this product is real and here and ready; green: non-technical value-adds decision-makers will appreciate; blue2: decision-makers see as extra nonsense, they "already know everything they need to know"; whereas techies see that and say, "Yes, yes, yes, this will be an improvement, Mr. Manager who asked my opinion via email, on our existing, Centralia-esque catalog system. You were right to observe the opportunity, sir. You are a philosopher-king of management."
3. Fixes.
a) Top bar:
* "Find out how easy it integrates"
* Logo: Black clashes with playfulness of leaf colors. I'd pick a light, light gray.
* Less-than-quick fix: rethink your white bar content. "How to" AND "FAQ" tells me users have a lot of questions. "Order" should be "pricing" or "plans" or "service tiers", etc. Lose the "login" button - implies (right or wrong, you tell me) that the librarians/whoever will need to run their system infrastructure from a web app -- this sounds great to me but does not scream reliability to decision-makers, and reliability is the one thing other than the obvious value-add you need to persuade them on. Lose "Free Trial" and replace it with a button/something elsewhere on main page. See patio11/Patrick McKenzie's vid on free-trial funneling (or maybe A/B testing).
* CHANGE YOUR "ABOUT" TO SOMETHING ELSE. Yours was the first "about" page I've clicked on in like 5 years. They usually have shit for content. Yours has great content! Nobody's ever going to see it!
b) Blue 1:
* Quick fixes: The publications. a) Either make the names clickable links to their corresp. reviews of your product, or (my preference), put an "as seen in" somewhere on the right-ish. b) Do something about the logo non-coherence. IMO, make all of them white. Actually, IMO, throw out Irish Times and RTE alltogether. If 2 of your 4 exes were runway model 10s and 2 were unphotogenic 5s, you would not, if you wanted to convince me you were a 10, show me pictures of all four. Why would you? Because four gf's is better than two gf's? I could've thought you were a 10; now I think you're a 7 who got lucky. c) Definitely, definitely move the App Store button beneath the publications. d) Replace the Android phone with an iPhone, and replace that screen with something that looks more fun/interesting to use. If you want to emphasize cross-platform availability, the place to do it, given your market, is with the choice of laptop. "Oh, all our computers are old PC's." -- decision maker who thinks you don't want his business. It will happen. Maybe already has.
c) Green: Make Coverswish photo bigger - I had to squint to tell what was going on. Change "fancy music album art" to iTunes. The attempt at distance made me think you were hiding from the association rather than embracing it, perhaps because you would prefer I think that you came up with it yourself. I don't care if you came up with it yourself. I care if it works just like iTun...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPy3T_vJEVY#at=42
If you continue with this, I would love to see a similar feature.
Many people here post un-productive comments and are very harsh but there's usually some truth being them. My advice to you is to take all the advice you "want" and build upon that. It takes a long time in order for you to get it "right" so keep changing things until it sticks.
Have you tried using Amazon as your search engine for ISBNs? From experience it is very accurate and complete. You can scrape using a URL like this: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=034551...
And a lot pricier. LibraryThing is US$10/year, or $25 for a lifetime membership. Libramatic is US$6.50/mo for 1000 books, or $40/mo for unlimited books/users. I presume your target market is libraries, rather than individual users, with prices like that.
Also, because you've already not managed to impress me with competence: What exactly is your user password storage algorithm?