

Ask HN: Any interest in a startup book review site? - prassarkar

(Treat this as a customer discovery phase)<p>After searching for some non-trivial amount of time I have yet to find a good review site/blog that caters to books of interest to the start up community. Since we're always strapped for time, I wonder whether it would help to create a site that would serve as a hub for these book reviews.<p>The core value here isn't just the reviews themselves but other related resources - TED talks, slides, HN discussion threads, case studies, links to "I used the advice in this book and this was my experience" articles, etc.<p>A peripheral value here is this site/blog would be indexed, categorized and of course searchable.
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revorad
<http://hn-books.com> is on the same lines.

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prassarkar
Thanks, I hadn't come across that in my search.

That site seems to solve the problem of finding book recommendations in a way
that's easily filtered/sorted. I like the fact that it lists additional
versions (ebook, pdf, etc.) of the book.

My thoughts were that the community might want to read reviews from a startup-
oriented individual rather than the default synopsis from the book's
publisher. I also imagined that multiple reviewers could review the same book
(either on the hub site or their own blog).

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revorad
DanielBMarkham, who runs hn books does write reviews as well. Letting users
review would probably be a nice addition.

Since you are going down the lean path, presumably you want to make money from
this. How will you do that?

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prassarkar
I wasn't exactly looking to make it a business but enough money to cover
operational costs. The revenue could be a mix of affiliate links + Adsense
(kept to a minimal).

The focus here is to create a community-focused treasure trove of startup
knowledge rather than a page-view focused content site.

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swanson
[http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/learning-python-3rd-
edition/...](http://www.hackerbooks.com/book/learning-python-3rd-
edition/0596513984)

<http://bibliotechnical.com/books/learning-python>

I made the latter; the problem I ran into was generating quality reviews and
related information. I found it was going to take a lot of manual curation to
get good results.

HN is also a tough crowd for this kind of project, I think you would be more
profitable trying to optimize for people searching for 'java book' instead of
those looking for the 'best java book given that I know how to program and
know these other languages'.

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droz
<http://www.goodreads.com/> already exists. It simply lacks a strong HN-
focused community. As others pointed out, we also have hn-books.com.

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JoachimSchipper
We already have hn-books.com and, IIRC, at least one competitor.

The transparent commerciality (bit.ly -> Amazon affiliate links) turns me off,
but others may think otherwise.

~~~
neuroelectronic
Yeah, not sure why people have objection to this. It's not like they are
affected. Sure, it reveals a motivation that otherwise might not be there, but
everyone has hidden motivations.

