

Book discovery service: No Names. No Jackets - mikecane
http://www.nonamesnojackets.com/launch-announcement/

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dsr_
UI note: when something looks like a button, it needs to be a button. The
genre "buttons" are only active right around their text, which means that "SF"
has a much smaller active area than "History", even though they present the
same visual appearance.

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auggierose
Yep, noticed the same. I guess most readers here on HN will go for the SF
genre first :-)

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cantlin
I'd like it even more streamlined. Send five anonymized snippets to my inbox
every Friday and let me click one button to order one of them to my door.
Anyone know a service like this?

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jastr
Zinc is an api that could be pretty useful for this. It let's you write code
to ship stuff. Pretty slick - [https://zinc.io/](https://zinc.io/)

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JeffJenkins
It seems like this is going to be heavily biased away from traditionally
published books if the authors/publishers have to upload the chapter. I'd
actually prefer they were using Amazon to pull in mainstream books.

~~~
owenjones
I agree; four of the five random picks I made took me to this author's
website:
[http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?page_id=2079](http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?page_id=2079).

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stared
As a side note, I love the footnote:

"3NJ uses cookies to function. For some insane reason EU law requires me to
tell you this. By continuing I assume your permission to do so. Complete info
on what they're used for is here. This banner will only appear once."

~~~
landhar
I don't think there's a need for this: "For some insane reason " it doesn't
sound very professional.

~~~
noir_lord
I'm not sure I agree, it really does depend on your target audience, I saw it
and it gave me a chuckle (as someone who remembers the flap about cookies a
few years ago).

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mickeyben
I spend about 1 hour a week at the bookstore, usually taking random books and
reading the first page(s).

I also try to discover new books on Amazon from time to time by going over
their selections and recommendations but I end up reading the same circle of
authors.

I think your idea is brilliant by matching my IRL process. I wish you a lot of
success.

EDIT: about the website itself it's nicely done, minimalist and easy. I'd
change the "Choose a genre" button to a dropdown. Also I'd have the top
navigation (the exploration/submit buttons) merged with the right one with the
menu following the scroll. This would be a a good incentive to navigate around
(easier and faster too).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Usually I sample mid-stream, as it were; about 60% in to the book I'll read a
couple of pages.

~~~
abraininavat
What is it you're looking for, exactly? Good grammar? Cheers to the OP for
thinking outside the box, but I don't think this service helps me, nor would
your technique. I yearn for good writing, but what I consider good writing
can't be determined from reading one chapter, and certainly not a couple pages
in the middle of a book. What matters to me is how the chapters (and the
people/places/events in them) fit together. The storycraft, if you will. Good
editing, internal consistency, etc. Once can only determine these things by
reading the whole book, or at least most of it. And since I don't have the
time to devote to reading bad books in the hope they'll be good, I greatly
rely on reviews, including those from Amazon.

~~~
waxjar
To me it's style, mostly. I used to just buy books, then got home, started
reading and discovered I really couldn't stand the style of writing or the
tone. I try to sample a little bit now.

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aet
Very creative, I will give this a try. However, I do think editors/publishers
provide value in that they at separate the wheat from the chaff.

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DanBC
I was thinking about this.

I don't know if there's such a thing as "freelance editors" or "freelance
typesetters" \- but there's a need for these kind of services for self-
published authors.

Some of the books I've read were okay, but could have been good with an editor
and with nicer spell / grammar checking.

I don't know how that business could work?

Authors sometimes collaborate. Perhaps something like a author's co-op? They
could pull in designers / artists for the covers and do cross-promotion too.

~~~
bstpierre
There are indeed freelance editors -- both at the copyedit level and at a
higher level.

Self-pubbed authors often hire freelance artists for cover design.

And there are freelance book designers for both dead-tree and e-books. There
are also services that provide "canned" book design service -- i.e. you pick
from a template.

To me it seems that the hardest part of the whole equation for an indy author
is promotion. There are so many books published daily that it's really hard to
get readers for your work.

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mathattack
It would be great if this works, but there is a lot of noise in the book
world. Even with good filtering I find myself putting down a lot of drivel.
This said, if it opens up the variety of what we're reading, it can't hurt.
Sometimes I wonder if Amazon and friends unduly cut down on the variety of
what I see. The browsing ability of bookstores has been lost.

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GotAnyMegadeth

        Security risk blocked for your protection
    
        Reason:
        This Websense category is filtered: Potentially Damaging
        Content. Sites in this category may pose a security
        threat to network resources or private information, and
        are blocked by your organization.

~~~
dmix
I always love when someone posts the false-positives of their companies shitty
firewall. It's not the website owners responsibility to be firewall friendly.

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pbhjpbhj
I like this. It presents a snippet from a book, you can choose to read a
longer snippet and then choose to get the book name and details.

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platz
All the random entries I got were either SF or crime... I think the source
list of books may have some bias torwards those genres

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blueblob
Seeing as the random from the fantasy genre always gives me item 220, I feel
as though it is not very random.

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Kuiper
I think that #220 is currently the only story in the database tagged as
"fantasy". Some of the genres (such as 'alt history' and 'western') have _no_
tagged stories. I presume that this is due to the service having just launched
--I'm sure that with enough exposure to self-published authors, this service
will have a sizable chunk of content to work with by the end of the day.

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egypturnash
I just posted the first chapter of my graphic novel. I'm interested to see how
they react to this.

