Hi all, creator here :)
I launched Shepherd.com on a Show HN in April 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660), and it has come a long way.
My goal with Shepherd is to create an experience that feels like wandering your local bookstore, along with little notes from authors & experts sharing why each book is one of their all-time favorites.
For 2023, I surveyed 1,200+ authors to get their three favorite reads of the year. Then I crunched that data and broke it by genre, age range, and when it was published. Publisher data is a nightmare, so some of the genres are not perfect; I am working on improving that and some of the NLP/ML that drives this.
Check out their top sci-fi reads: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/science-fiction
Or, their top nonfiction reads: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/nonfiction
You can also zoom in on each author’s favorite 3 reads.
Louise Carey - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/louise-carey
Kevin Klehr - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/kevin-klehr
Alice C. Hill - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/alice-c-hill
Sara Ackerman - https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/sara-ackerman
My email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to share ideas or suggestions for 2024.
Thanks, Ben
P.S. I have a newsletter for readers here where I share what I am building, new features, my fav book lists: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/newsletter-for-readers
1. Use links, when there’s a list, I open links in new tabs that I want to check. This is some kind of JS-only app that doesn’t have links, only JS behavior. Please don’t break the browser for no good reason, this makes it really hard to actually use the site.
2. Get a better source for the book data:
> What is this book about?
> Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones.
> 15+ pages of new, original content, including a glossary of terms, in-universe writings, and more!
> A USA Today Best-Selling Novel!
> "Unlike anything I've ever read. " --V.E. Schwab
> "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" --Charles Stross
> "Brilliantly original, messy and weird straight through." --NPR
Almost everything I checked had a bunch of absolutely useless marketing blurbs at the top, maybe one or two paragraphs of explaining what the book is about at the end, but not even always that. I don’t know how accessible it is, but goodreads tends to have descriptions without those blurbs.