Fetching books from HN threads is IMO a really good idea, but using the submission title seems to produce completely inaccurate teasers for me. I'd recommend fetching the title from Amazon too, and also somehow weighting the books by comment upvotes.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestions! Book titles would make more sense definitely. But post titles lead to surprising and funny results sometimes.
Very cool idea. I recently spent quite a while paging through HNSearch.com looking for book recommendations.
My recommendation would be to make sure the "Next" button never moves. Some really long titles cause it to get pushed down a bit and that gets annoying when you're clicking on "Next" at a fast rate.
I also agree there needs to be a little more information on the page because of the sometimes-indirect post titles. I find myself hovering the Amazon link to see the name of the book.
If I recall, there was a guy who also scraped hn but included movies and other things. It wasn't limited to clicks, he had all the information in lists.
Thank you for that! Somehow I went to a tangent on your site the last time I saw it and came across r/Cyberpunk. I believe you should include subreddit mentions too.
Finding interesting books to read is a huge problem for me. I have tried Goodreads, but its recommendations are poor. I usually just use random lists to find things to read.
I really like the general idea of something like this, but a way to restrict by category or train it in some way would make it a lot more useful for me.
Very cool. Naturally, scraping out of HN is gonna provide a few wonky teasers, but a great idea nonetheless. Just submitted my book per the site's instructions for kicks
http://www.amazon.com/dp/111866146X
There are some sites that generate decent Amazon Associates revenue without millions of visitors — it's a question of whether one of the main interactions users expect to make with your site is buying something from Amazon. Considering what you're building, it's worth at least experimenting with. Other booksellers (like Powells) have their own affiliate programs too.
thursdayb, you're shadowbanned (which is a shame, because that was a good comment). Might email pg and see what's up. Your comment history looks benign to me.
