
Show HN: See what Hacker News thinks of the book you're looking at on Goodreads - spookyuser
https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-reads
======
spookyuser
This is a small extension I made to combine my love of Hacker News book
recommendation threads and hate of Goodreads community reviews.

It uses the Algolia search API to find comments that match the title and
author of a book page on Goodreads. Initially I wanted to use ISBN numbers but
there are too many comments mentioning books on HN that don't use the ISBN
number and for some reason Amazon links are rarely indexed without truncation
by Algolia, which means the end bit of a long Amazon url that contains the
ISBN isn't searchable.

The hardest part of this extension was figuring out how people write book
titles. For instance, most people don't seem to write out full book titles
rather they write out the title minus any subtitles. Because of this, if you
search for the exact Goodreads title on Hacker news you won't find that many
comments, and what turns out to work much better is searching for books
without any subtitles.

Also worth mentioning that this is similar to
[https://hackernewsbooks.com/](https://hackernewsbooks.com/) (which I enjoy a
lot) except instead of seeing HN's favorite books you see all opinions good
and bad, and you can also see them directly in Goodreads.

You can download it for Chrome [1] or Firefox [2] or see the source code on
Github [3].

Hope you like it :)

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ohkekgnmihdgcfflhe...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ohkekgnmihdgcfflheadklfihdaibdcb/)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/hacker-
reads-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/hacker-reads-for-
goodreads/)

[3] [https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-
reads](https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-reads)

~~~
mdrachuk
Are you planning on a Safari extension?

~~~
spookyuser
I actually hadn't planned on releasing the extension for Safari but I'll
definitely look into it. If Safari supports the Browser Extension API it
should be trivial to port.

