
Show HN: Kooba, an interactive graph for finding new books - cloudbeary
http://koob.jake.run
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aaachilless
Do many people have a hard time finding books to read? I have the exact
opposite problem: I'm constantly overwhelmed by the tidal wave of books that
is my to-read list. I'd give my right arm to be able to read 2x as fast as I
do today.

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bradleyjg
There's always another book to read. But the books that I remember years
later, the real gems, are few and far between. If I had some even marginally
better process for finding those than dumb luck, I'd be thrilled.

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aaachilless
There must be some fundamental difference between the way you and I read,
because I feel like I'm wading through a sea of gems when it comes to choosing
books. Every once in a while I come upon a dud, but not often at all. And the
duds are basically always very specific to my personal taste. For example, you
mentioned Anathem as a gem, and I love Neal Stephenson and have read most of
his work, but reading Anathem a couple weeks ago I was bored out of my mind.

Google search and Amazon reviews are actually excellent book-finding tools and
I don't believe there's much value to be squeezed out of what they leave on
the table.

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fouc
Did you finish Anathem?

It was a brutal start for me, I didn't get into it until after the first 300
pages. Then it was fantastic. (I basically hate the overly descriptive setup
because I don't really like wasting my time trying to visualize what the
author is describing).

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aaachilless
I didn't and for essentially the reason you described. The minutiae of the
setting kept getting in the way of enjoying the story and the characters.
Maybe I'll give it another go. Still, 300 pages is quite the hurdle.

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noufalibrahim
I loved Anathem. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I heard about the
Long Now foundation and their work at roughly the same time. Stephenson's
wanderings into tangential topics is annoying at times but I stopped judging
and just read it like a stream of consciousness kind of thing and it worked
out quite well.

Everyone I've recommended the book to has either been overwhelmed because of
the size or bored because of the length.

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qrv3w
Cool! I actually made a book recommendation service as well. [1] Its been
indispensable for me, gives me much better recommendations than
friends/Amazon/Goodreads give me. I've found Library at Mount Char and Hard
Magic because I wanted something similar to Weaveworld [2] and both those have
been perfect. I'm only two months into using it, but I feel like I have a
never-ending reading list now!

I look forward to trying yours when it is back online (service was disrupted
when I tried).

[1] [https://www.booksuggestions.ninja/](https://www.booksuggestions.ninja/)

[2] [https://rpiai.com/why-i-made-a-book-recommendation-
service/](https://rpiai.com/why-i-made-a-book-recommendation-service/)

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Jemaclus
Library at Mount Char was reeeeally disturbing. Good, but ye gads... not what
I was expecting... :)

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qrv3w
Its funny, I was sort of expecting something disturbing because I got the
recommendation through Weaveworld.

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cloudbeary
Hey! Wanted to let you guys know that we use Amazon data and currently the
Amazon API limits the request rate so that if there's multiple concurrent
visitors it might be temporarily delayed. Working on fixing it now!

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jszymborski
Rate-limiting task queue and aggressive caching might help out... "Shown HN"
loosely translates to "DDoS Me" :P

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bradleyjg
I'm still playing with it because of the, completely understandable, technical
problems. But initial comments:

1) Love the idea, I'm always struggling to find the next book to read.

2) It seems to be pulling some scam books, I put _East of Eden_ in and got
some sort of help you with your homework summary book.

3) I'd echo the suggestion to deemphasize other books by the same author. If I
loved _Foucault 's Pendulum_, I almost certainly already know about _In the
Name of the Rose_.

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hxn
Reminds me of [http://www.literature-map.com](http://www.literature-map.com)

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noufalibrahim
This is beautifully done. I'm happy about your successful implementation and
half annoyed that now, I'm going to get even more books in my "to read" list.
:-|

Back when I worked on openlibrary, we had something called "subjects" (e.g.
[https://openlibrary.org/subjects/architecture](https://openlibrary.org/subjects/architecture))
and at the bottom, it would give out "Related..." books (by subject, place
etc.). It was an extremely simple algorithm but gave me quite some nice things
to follow.

Good work!

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trowawee
Interesting concept, and a really fun interface. The main issue I'm seeing is
that the suggestions being surfaced are too close to what I've already
selected - i.e., once I've indicated that I've read one or two of the books in
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, it should probably downrank the
others, because while they are similar, it is likely that someone who's
indicated they liked two of them has already read the others. There also seems
to be an issue where the list of recommendations on the right still contains
some of the books I've already liked.

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cloudbeary
Yes, totally agree! We're going to make adjustments to the algorithm so that
books by the same author show up less (obviously if I'm searching for Harry
Potter I'm probably not looking to be recommended six other J.K. Rowling
books).

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herlitzj
Is this just an item-item collaborative filter based on star ratings and
cosine distance or do you have something more sophisticated going on?

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labso
As many have said here, finding books is easy, finding good books in a
particular niche is hard. For me using this tool gave few new books to my
reading list.

As a side note, I an quite social reader and like to read books that I can
have conversations about. Amazon ratings etc. are quite good in that already,
but the visualization helps big time.

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BeetleB
Would really like a way to import books from my LibraryThing profile. I have
too many to add manually.

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k__
503 (Service Unavailable)

Guess HN killed it :\

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donatj
Suffers from my biggest complaint about modern JS applications as well: The
assumption that the server is infallible.

The progress bar simply never goes away and my console is full of 503's. I sat
waiting for like 30-40 seconds before I decided to check. Give me an error
message so I know something went wrong at the very least!

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DomreiRoam
If you're ready to invest some time www.librarything.com allows you to catalog
your books and then gives you recommendations.

Still I hope to see Kooba working to find other books to add to my reading
list :)

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daviesgeek
I would love to see this work better on mobile. I'm not sure if it's just not
working due to the rate limiting but it's not really working for me (Safari,
iPhone 6, iOS 10)

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yuchi
Suggestion: cancel pending requests when another one is requested.

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Scriptor
On top of that, maybe only send requests when a user hits enter or submits the
form. Could ease up the load a bit.

As of right now I am unable to get anything to happen.

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ospohngellert
I am wondering what api you used for book search, as I am currently thinking
of undertaking a project involving books. Thanks :)

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breck
This looks awesome. Look forwarding to using it but right now getting some
errors in the console. Maybe load problems?

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aesthetics1
When I click a details link, it sends me to the Canadian Amazon link. Any way
to fix that? Looks neat otherwise.

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cloudbeary
Going to switch it to amazon.com!

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FourSigma
Can anyone comment on the benefits of using the Goodreads API vs Amazon?

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Exuma
Never loaded...

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randcraw
It loads but it doesn't respond when I type in a title. Just three reddish
disks that blink forever.

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phusion
Same... typed in a book title in a couple different browsers, just the red
dots appear :/

