

Show HN: My product lets you catalog your book collection online - ShaneCurran
http://www.libramatic.com
My story:<p>I founded this a couple of years ago because my school (I was 11&#x2F;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.<p>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.<p>Currently the business is thriving and is growing rapidly.<p>I&#x27;d really appreciate any feedback you might have.<p>Thanks,<p>Shane
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kabdib
I tried doing this to my book collection a few years ago. Things that I found:

* 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?

~~~
hack_edu
Your local Cataloging Librarian, brought to you by the above bullet points.

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buro9
A few Qs.

> 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.

~~~
rdouble
_you probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet_

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.

~~~
buro9
goodreads is great for discovery, but my girlfriend struggled and loathed it
for cataloguing.

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.

~~~
rdouble
Did you use the mobile app?

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.

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ShaneCurran_
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

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radicaledward
Unfortunately, a lot of people who want a service like this have already
picked up LibraryThing -
[http://www.librarything.com/](http://www.librarything.com/) People like me
who already have a significant amount of time invested in LibraryThing won't
want to make the switch. Plus LibraryThing is $25 for life (USD).

------
DanBC
A couple of typos:

> 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!

~~~
gngeal
_This is something that will make large portions of your target audience
twitch._

Exactly, this is for literrate people!

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wrath
Great job! Not many people at your age can create their own products.

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...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-
keywords=0345511425)

~~~
wukerplank
I don't think the Amazon TOS let you use their API on mobile devices. That's
why we don't have Delicious Library on our mobile devices.

~~~
gngeal
Does that mean that you're not allowed to view the page on your mobile device
either? Is that supposed to be some sort of a silly artificial restriction?

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jami
I don't know how many other people track their book collection this way, but
the ability to import a Goodreads shelf would be useful to me. I have an "own"
shelf on Goodreads to track what I have in my home/Kindle. A one-click import
would save me a lot of redundant bar code scanning. Documentation for the
relevant Goodreads API call:
[http://www.goodreads.com/api#reviews.list](http://www.goodreads.com/api#reviews.list)

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archivator
Why would I use this over Goodreads, where I also get meaningful discussions,
reviews, and rating, as well as a half-decent recommendation engine?

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dataplayer
I thought about doing this at one point but ran into many API fees to look up
ISBN related details. Can you discuss what API you are using, fees you pay to
the API owner, and how that is incorporated into your fee? Also, did you write
your own ISBN phone scanner app? Or are you leveraging some other, possibly
open source, application? Any details would be great to hear. Nice Job!

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ljd
Back when facebook apps first started I wanted to write an app that allowed a
user enter in all their books and allow a library like checkout system where
your pool of possible books to checkout were the collection of all your
friends books (where they allow "friends to checkout" on certain books).

If you continue with this, I would love to see a similar feature.

~~~
junto
Did you have any success with that app?

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egypturnash
This sure is a lot more Bootstrap-slick than LibraryThing.

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.

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smackay
I did not see it in a quick look through the site but the most obvious missing
feature would be the ability to share book lists with friends. Expanding the
loan out feature to support requests would allow you to run your own little
library service quite easily.

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dutchbrit
Interview with the creator. Very well done Shane, nice job. You kept it simple
yet powerful!

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPy3T_vJEVY#at=42](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPy3T_vJEVY#at=42)

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harrytuttle
I use excel and SkyDrive for the same thing. Works across my phone, desktop
and the web.

Sometimes worse is better. Specialised applications can't beat generalised
ones or tools to build what you want.

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codex
For $70 a year, I can afford to lose a couple of books, all without the
trouble of scanning them. What is the value of the personal edition?

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dsirijus
Looks very well done!

However, how does this integrate with existing user's ebook libraries?

~~~
ShaneCurran_
Thanks :-)

At the moment it is targeted towards physical book collections, but we're
currently working hard on eBook integration.

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adrow
Your 'Cloud Scalable' icon looks a little lower resolution than the others.

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pagekicker
Hasn't LibraryThing been doing this with CueCats for about ten years?

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joelhaasnoot
Ah, one of the "not compatible with your device" apps...

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house9-2
unless I am missing something your login and signup pages do not appear to be
using SSL

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nairboon
how is this different from goodreads.com?

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marincounty
There's cheaper alternatives. I don't like anything billed monthly.

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mdt
1\. Great product. Fantastic product.

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
iTunes. I know iTunes. I trust iTunes. Any friend/copycat of iTunes is a
friend of mine.

* Get rid of "using a smartphone's camera". "So, do I use the camera app, or...what." This confusion is the reason QR codes never blew up.

* Less conceptual-style language, more concrete-object language. "Libramatic then retrieves the book's catalog information for automatic viewing - title, author, and even content abstracts."

* MUCH better than the current graphic would be just a zoom of a screenshot of Libramatic displaying a really impressive abstract. Define as you will. But be sure to partial-zoom, focusing on the abstract and cutting off the other info, because you're not trying to sell them on that, because Libramatic is too awesome to think of mere book titles and author names as an impressive feature, and because your customers expect better. Whether or not any of that is true, I have no idea, but that's the impression you should give.

d) Blue2: You already know what, you lazy person. All the icons and paras are
offset and different sizes and different styles even. Stop dat. Also, I
disagree with some icon choices, especially the globe and the paintbrush
(kidding). But I gotta go now, late for lunch. Shit. Anyway, good luck out
there, Shane.

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wlesieutre
A heads up, your account is hellbanned. Don't know why, but in case you can't
get it fixed while this is still on the front page, you might want to get use
an alt to answer questions here.

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Mithaldu
Why the hell would you limit this to only Apple machines, when literally every
smartphone, and most laptops have an integrated camera?

Also, because you've already not managed to impress me with competence: What
exactly is your user password storage algorithm?

~~~
gngeal
The page says _" Libramatic runs on multiple platforms including Android
devices and any internet-enabled computer"_.

