
Beta launch: Squeezed Books (YC wasn't-even-submitted company) - davidw
http://www.squeezedbooks.com
======
davidw
On a playful note, since I've seen a couple "YC reject" tagged launches, I
thought I'd label mine "YC wasn't-even-submitted".

In any case, the idea comes from something that Phillip Greenspun wrote, which
sums up what I think of some (but not all) business books:

"This book illustrates a fault in the publishing industry. If you have a
50-page idea it is too long for a magazine. But it is too short for a book. So
if you wanted to get it distributed before the Web came along, you had to drop
in words until you reached 200 pages."

I wanted to create an _open_ and _collaborative_ site for business book
summaries. There are already sites out there that charge between 100-200 USD a
year for a stream of summaries, but that has two problems:

\- Of course, it prices many people out of the market.

\- More importantly, I want to create a place where people can discuss these
books. Reading something is only part of learning. Going out and actually
doing something is probably the best way, but being able to discuss ideas is
also pretty helpful.

So... the result was this site, which I put together pretty quickly. I had fun
adding a few summaries (I found that writing down what I'd learned from a book
forced me to think about it a bit more), got a few friends to add others, and
here we are.

By signing up for the site and working on a summary or two, you get a link
back to your own site, as well as a link to your amazon wishlist, with
encouragement to visitors to spring for a book or two for people who have
worked on high quality summaries.

Constructive comments/suggestions/whatever more than welcome!

~~~
tx
I spent some time navigating around and I have a few suggestions: \- You make
me scroll too much, why not put ratings/voting on the right, instead of having
them "downstairs"? \- I'll say this again: you need a designer. \- Too much
data at once: why not have two tabs for each book? (summary/discussion)
Similar to wikipedia. \- You can start a small marketplace right away: give
people "offer this book for sale" option.

~~~
davidw
Designer: You're right, of course. I'd like to have someone to work with, but
I can't pay right now, so it'd have to be someone coming on board to work on
this and other sites for equity. I'd like that, but even then the person needs
to be a good fit. Anyone here is welcome to get in touch with me and talk.
Beyond that, thank you for the _specific_ discussion points. That helps my
"engineer-visual-design" brain target concrete things that I can improve.

\- Moving the ratings/voting up is probably a good idea.

\- A separate page for the discussion might risk making it invisible - the
scenario I envisage is someone coming to the site, seeing a comment and
feeling a _need_ to respond to it because it makes sense, or is wrong, or
needs responding too in some way. But if that's all burried under a
'discussion' link, it might not be so easy to find. Of course you're right
that it doesn't (can't really) jump out at you right now because it's at the
bottom of the page...

\- book marketplace: I'm not convinced - that's Amazon's business, and I have
no hope of competing with them. I do have a shot, I think, at creating a place
for people to come and discuss the books, because their review/comment system
doesn't really foster that kind of interaction, and I'm targeting a niche that
is small/concentrated enough that I have a chance at prevailing.

------
webwright
Neat idea.

I'd add my voice to the chorus - get a designer. I'd caution AGAINST the
elance route. Design is an iterative process-- very few designers hit the nail
on the head the first time. Design, test/get feedback, rinse, repeat. And, of
course, design isn't just slinging pixels around-- it's designing the user
experience (which might require changing your code).

Of course, a cheap "coat of paint" wouldn't be a terrible thing, if you can't
afford a more gold-plated solution (or attract a designer-cofounder).

------
tx
Cool idea and I like your lightweight pages. I would still consider spending
some little money (less than $1K) to hire a designer, though.

~~~
mattjaynes
I second that. Great functionality, but it suffers from engineer-visual-
design. For a couple hundred bucks on elance you could get a much more elegant
design. To be honest it has the layout of a lot of spam sites (lots of links,
centered text) and you'll lose some users very quickly on that aspect alone.
But really great functionality - keep up the good work!

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aston
Cool, cool. The statistic "12% of this site's users have read this book"
struck me as really interesting. Based on how well read stuff is, you
essentially get a "must-read" list for free. That might be a cool feature for
folks.

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juliob
isn't this like <http://www.wikisummaries.org> ?

~~~
davidw
Yes, it's similar, but more focused on business books, and my goal is also to
try and create more of a comunity aspect, with discussion of the books in
question.

Note, also, that wikisummaries, from all I can tell, is _not_ part of the
wikipedia group of sites, but they're rather cleverly piggybacking on the
name.

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rokhayakebe
Love it. Love it. Love it

~~~
davidw
... but not enough to vote for it? :-)

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brlewis
When I tried to start a summary for "How to Win Friends and Influence People"
it wasn't clear which Amazon search result I should choose.

~~~
davidw
They're ranked by sales, so the more popular ones show up first. Usually the
first one is the best. I should put some instructions to that effect. Go ahead
and use the first one if you want to have a crack at it.

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ralph
Whether I'm logged in or not, let me pick my favourite bookshop from your
list, e.g. amazon.com versus amazon.co.uk versus ...

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mkull
very cool idea.. was not expecting much but was pretty immediately hooked. I
like it. get a designer and spruce up that UI!

------
sudhirc
<http://www.summary.com> is your competition.. Gud luck

~~~
davidw
There are a number of other sites that do business book summaries:

\- getabstract.com

\- bizsum.com

\- summaries.com

What I'm attempting to do is change the model a little bit. They all have
professional reviews, and charge a lot of money for a number of summaries
every year. For people who are willing to pay, they may even offer better
summaries, although the standard format might be a bit limiting.

But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything else
beyond getting the summary itself. My reasoning is that people will be
interested in the summary, but get more out of being able to discuss the ideas
presented.

~~~
bootload
_'... But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything
else beyond getting the summary itself ...'_

Amazon does this. It was the subject of that great book ( _Amazonia, Five
Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut_ ~
<http://tinyurl.com/364d9f> ) and tells the story of Bezos hiring employee
#55, _'James Marcus'_ as book editor asking him ... _"how many 100 word
reviews can you write in x minutes?"_ \- The implication being he wanted to
find ways to scale reviews beyond employees writing 100 word reviews.

 _".... why do computer users take time away from their own lives and work to
help people around the world whom they don't even know? ..."_

Now your 'stab' at this has a good chance of doing better, if you can solve
the problem of why people write free documentation (supply) and allow the
creation of something that people want to read (demand). The reviews at Amazon
are 'ok' but lack follow-up. There's a great article I found on _"Why Do
People Write Free Documentation?"_ and some conclusions after asking a
questionnaire that might answer some questions you have on this ~
<http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/7062>

As for the site, I like it. Signed up, got an account & checked a title,
modified my bio. Pretty easy. Found the book I searched for (
<http://tinyurl.com/34dsnb> ) So if I write comments, add comments can I
_consume_ this data? Use it beyond going to a page? What I would like to see
(more of) is

\- choice of licenses (creative commons) to release any writing

\- access to rss, atom feeds, collective & personal OR an API to query data

\- access to stats on the books & reviews (titles, who wrote what, how many
words)

All of which allow you to not only add to the site but add to the value of the
data by consuming it in your own blogs, products etc.

~~~
davidw
Thanks for the feedback - it's a good feeling to see someone thinking about
what I've started creating, and I appreciate it.

Amazon is certainly a giant that could probably wipe out both my site and some
of the others in a minute if they chose. On the other hand, being so big means
that they don't have the focus, so people go for the reviews, but that
notwithstanding, there seems to be a thriving summary business, so I guess
they're not satisfied with reviews, and that's understandable. Reviews are
teasers and opinions on the merits of the book rather than attempts at
faithful summaries of the book's key points.

Now, some of your points:

Licenses - yes... I've been mulling that over. The issue is of course how much
control to give up. Too little, and perhaps people will be less interested in
contributing. More data (what does everyone here think?) would be useful.

RSS/Atom is a high priority item to add - its usefulness is obvious. The
question in my mind is what to create a feed for - new books added? Newly
added books are at their most useless stage, because they don't have a summary
just yet (hopefully one gets added soon, but still). It would be easy to add
feeds for summary updates, but perhaps that would be sort of annoying for
minor updates.

Stats are another area I'm working on. First and foremost is to visually
display who contributed how much to any given summary, so that people can't
just change a word or two and get marked as a contributor.

Thanks again!

------
ivan
Very useful :)

------
ph0rque
to (mis)quote reddit: facebook app or it didn't happen :).

~~~
aston
Thumbs down on this. Facebook is not the new internet.

~~~
ph0rque
_Thumbs down on this. Facebook is not the new internet._

No, it isn't. However, if one's site is depends on social networking
behaviors, like community-generated content, like this one is, it wouldn't
hurt to use facebook's social graph to quickly generate content. Furthermore,
as a suggestion, one could implement reddit and news.yc-style moderation on
summaries, comments, and even authors to let the community decide quality
books/reviews.

~~~
aston
I actually differ pretty strongly on this point (and I plan on writing at
length on it sometime). Just because Facebook's network stuff is relatively
accessible does not make it the right choice for your site's social features.
There are benefits to establishing the links that mean something to your
website. I'm "friends" with a lot of people on Facebook, but I trust barely
any of their book recommendations, just as one example.

~~~
sbraford
If this app "takes off" on the world wide interweb, it'll be lucky if it has
10-20k users within a few months.

If it "takes off" in facebook-land, it'll be doing OK if it only has 50-100k
users after a few months.

~~~
davidw
The apps here (see below) don't look very businessy, and while the demographic
I'm targeting isn't perhaps quite the same as existing summary sites, I don't
think it overlaps a great deal with the lolcats type users, either. Are there
"serious" facebook apps?

<http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6191391-9.html?tag=ne.gall.pg>

~~~
ph0rque
It isn't surprising that FB apps are not very serious, since FB is in its
formative stages as a "real" website (one that is used for serious things, for
arbitrary values of serious). I think that if facebook keeps growing like it
is now, we will see the introduction of serious apps that in turn will attract
more users, etc etc. Remember, 10 years ago no-one thought the internet will
be used for serious things.

