

Browse Amazon, Randomly - hmason
http://www.bookbookgoose.com

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gourneau
I really love this! I opened it and just jam on the next key (n).

Use this little snippet to set it to auto-next mode, for a great screensaver.
Edit - here is the screensaver <https://github.com/gourneau/WebSaver>

    
    
      setInterval(function(){$("#book_next").click()}, 500)
    

Watching all of books fly by is wondrous to me because it feels like it is
painting some weird version of conscious reality.

Hilary could you please add this bit of code so for auto advancing mode via
the query string.

    
    
      function getParameterByName(name) {
          var match = RegExp('[?&]' + name + '=([^&]*)').exec(window.location.search);
          return match && decodeURIComponent(match[1].replace(/\+/g, ' '));
      }
    
      if (getParameterByName("auto")){
    	  setInterval(function(){$("#book_next").click()}, getParameterByName("auto"))
      }
    

It would work like this, where 500 is the number of milliseconds.
<http://www.bookbookgoose.com/?auto=500>

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hmason
Thanks. I just deployed this update. Have fun!

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bhoomit
Hey, there seems to be a bug for slow internet connections, it shows the same
image for the next books when the next book image is not loaded.

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crisnoble
This is pretty awesome, it is amazing to see all the weird titles out there.

Is anyone else surprised by the amount of: "This is a reproduction of a book
published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as
missing or blurred pages, poor pictures..." books for sale on Amazon?

~~~
Wingman4l7
Google "Amazon ebook spam" and you'll see several articles about it -- their
self-publishing system has really gotten hammered with it. In this case, it
sounds like the content is just copied from the public domain.

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bertomartin
Another thing, make an obvious link to the amazon page. something like "see it
on amazon.com"

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logn
And why not add your referral code too?

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strangestchild
This is really great - love the idea. Just in case you hadn't spotted, I think
there's a punctuation bug whereby characters are sometimes omitted, although
it doesn't happen all the time. Not a big deal though.

Example:

Correctly punctuated original: <http://tinyurl.com/b6sbozh>

Bookbookgoose ignores the apostrophes: <http://imgur.com/4U9Ow>

[EDIT: Dropbox link was broken - using imgur instead]

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nathanb
Fair warning: the first title that came up for me was NSFW.

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zipop
That would have been good to know before I started clicking. DANG!

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jordanmessina
Very cool. Somewhat similar to my book discovery app <http://quotab.ly>
(discover via random quotes). Where did you end up getting your data? Did you
scrape Amazon or are you using their API?

~~~
hmason
Both, actually. The API is too slow to use live for this app.

~~~
jordanmessina
Nice, any plans to do more with it?

~~~
hmason
Yes! This was really just to establish the base case -- is randomly 'walking'
through all books available interesting?

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untangle
Love it.

Can you please add filters for "by-genre" and "kindle-only"? Please..

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whelps
I understand where the name came from, but bookbookgoose just doesn't work for
me. Its just too long and unwieldy for me. As for the service itself, I am not
sure what type of customer this is servicing. Are there people out there that
are trying to find random books to read without any context (i.e. subject
matter, recommendations from others, etc.)? Now, I think this would be a lot
more useful if you could perhaps do the random thing but filtered by some
criteria that makes it relevant to the user. So, for example, I want to read
about 'javascript' and I search through random javascript books. It would also
help to display the amazon rankings and other stats.

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marquis
it's probably a play on duckduckgo.

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hmason
It's a play on "duck duck goose", the children's game. The similarity to
duckduckgo was unintentional, but I like it. I actually wanted to call it
"bookroulette", but all permutations of that domain were taken.

~~~
kingkool68
I own the domain name randomamazon.com. I always wanted to get around to doing
something like this.

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felipebueno
It's pretty cool! But I didn't like the name too =p... One more thing: 'n' and
'b' shortcuts not working on the Firefox (17.0.1).

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jaydub
I like it, can you add random browsing within a category (e.g. I want to
browse random humor books)

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bertomartin
duckduckgo? Anyways, I actually found this useful. What might be a good
addition is current ratings (if Amazon expose such information). Another
thing, put the "back" button next to the "next" button; improves usability

~~~
whatusername
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose>

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ubojan
great idea, I really like this site! I found a little glitch, it happens when
image is too high. Here is a screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/IzhRF.jpg>

