

For book lover, do you like my idea on selectist.com? - steveneo

I just launched a website http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.selectist.com where people talk about the books they love. It’s based on lists of your favourite books, not book ratings or reviews. You create lists of your top 3 -5 books on any topic and can see what other people think too. The key concept is a list of books can build up more meaningful context among books rather than a single book links others by keywords or individual interest etc.<p>Please check out www.selectist.com and let me know what you think of the idea and the site. Any feedback, comments, questions or random thought would be greatly appreciated.
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brudgers
Three tweets doesn't build enough context _for me._ A product in the book
space needs to express a passion for books and that's hard to do without
acting as if books are worth the investment of time spent reading. I think of
BookTV and the New York Times Sunday section and the back of _The Nation_.

"Let me tell you about this great book" can't be pulled off in 200 words. If
that's all you have to say, it wasn't that good.

Frequently, there will be an "Ask HN: Where Can I Find the Hacker News for _X_
" Usually I think, well that would be Hacker News. But as I was writing my
reply, I thought 'a Hacker News for books just might work". Push the big idea
about which you have passion harder. Good luck.

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drygh
Interesting idea. I mainly read philosophy, classics, and some fiction.
Anyway, I think between Goodreads and Amazon reviews, I can generally get a
feel of what to expect. They also have the advantage because independent
review/recommender systems are the norm, and they work for most people. I
think reviews and recommendations are tough to get in to when you have a huge
chicken/egg problem. Even if you aggregated all reviews for a book and added
something unique on top, it's only making the experience marginally better.

I do think having unique context could be pretty interesting. The narrower and
more specific a list, the more value it would add. Having a "My Top 5 Books"
list provides no value to me. A recommender algorithm will win at that game.
However, having a "Romantic Thrillers Where Protagonist Gets Kidnapped While
On Vacation" list is at least something unique. I think search could be kind
of addictive if there were tons of random and extremely narrow lists. If you
did go this route it seems collaborating to build the lists would be pretty
cool. Having lists tied to a user seems like it would make it harder to come
up with really unique and narrow lists as a community. Maybe you could have
both?

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steveneo
Many thanks for your great comments. The site is just launched, we still need
time to figure out a good algorithm to link the list context and make
recommendation. We will focus on accurate recommendation first and get more
user then gradually create a community.

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akbarnama
Clickable [http://www.selectist.com](http://www.selectist.com)

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steveneo
Thanks for your favour:)

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marvvelous
GoodReads has lists pretty locked up for me. Discovery isn't perfect but
Selectist seems to be more of what we already have. I'd love to see some
innovation here though. Maybe some exhaustive normalized tagging and filtering
(AND, OR, NOT).

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VonGallifrey
The Site looks good, but when I tried to search for something I instinctively
typed it in the huge Text Input in the Top only to discover that this is not a
Search but a create instead. Is there a way to search the Site?

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camillomiller
Nice. I created a Vonnegut books list, but the output is not in the original
order.

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steveneo
Yes, List display in order is good, I will fix it.

