

Ask HN: Review My Startup. Bookhu.com: The Gender Compatibility Engine for Books - pmjoyce

http://www.bookhu.com<p><i>The problem I'm trying to solve:</i><p>I'm a casual reader of fiction.  Once or twice a year I visit amazon and browse their bestsellers looking for inspiration.  I don't keep up-to-date with fiction and find it quite time consuming to find something suitable.  I thought it would be great to have a couple of filters based on the readership/intended market for a given book so I could at least make a quick shortlist.<p>Last week I decided to see if I could make a start on something that might suit starting with the gender of the readers.  Yesterday I launched Bookhu.com which lets you search for any book (via the Amazon API) and see the gender split of the people who review the book together with the average rating by gender.<p>It's very early days (I only started on it last week) but any thoughts would be appreciated.
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rsheridan6
Chicks dig Knuth:
[http://www.bookhu.com/analyse/?ASIN=0321637135&title=The...](http://www.bookhu.com/analyse/?ASIN=0321637135&title=The+Art+of+Computer+Programming++Vol++4++Fascicles+0+4++5+Volume+Set+)

It would be nice if it would show the breakdown when you search an author
rather than making you click again for a breakdown for each book. Having
worked with Amazon's shitty API, I'm guessing that their constraints forced
you to do it like that. If I were working with them again I'd ignore their API
and scrape HTML instead.

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pmjoyce
You're right, I'm having to work with restrictions imposed by the Amazon API.
I think I could probably tighten up the process a little more though.

I wonder how much use an author page might be - similar gender breakdown stats
but for the author instead of individual books.

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hackoder
Good stuff. Agree with what has been said about it looking like a domain
parking page.

Thoughts: \- The simple look is very useful. List of books, search,
categories. Well done. \- The feedback "tab"(?) at the side. Why not move it
to the bottom right, or at the top as a menu item?

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DanielStraight
Two thoughts:

1\. The site looks like a domain parking page.

2\. Why can I not view books sorted by gender distribution? That seems like
the entire point of the site, yet I can't do it.

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pmjoyce
1\. Really? I have to hold my hand up on this one. It's a product of a $30
Wordpress theme and my below par design skills. That's useful feedback.

2\. Yes that's the point of the site and something I'm actively working on.
More accurately, it something I'm trying to make more efficient because right
now it's just too expensive with the way I'm using the amazon api.

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pclark
You could probably get a ton of users by integrating with Librarything etc and
offering widgets that show the gender gap of users libraries.

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araneae
I think it would be very cool if you could integrate it with goodreads.com
etc. I want to know the gender split of my bookshelf ^-^

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pmjoyce
Yeah, that would be pretty interesting and could be the foundations of some
sort of personalized reccommendation functionality.

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defen
Start a dating service which matches you up with people purely based on what
books you both read/enjoy. Dating seems to be a perennial YC favorite, maybe
they would fund you.

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pmjoyce
I wonder if there has been any research on the relationship between book
preference and attractiveness.

