Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads

[justinberding]

Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember.

Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting.

So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph.

We also felt like it was important for Booqsi to be independent of Amazon; we care about supporting local bookstores, so every book in Booqsi links you to Bookshop.org to purchase that book (not Amazon).

Here are some of my favorite features launched as part of beta:

- A book-focused social feed (finally!)

- Beautifully-rendered custom bookshelves to show off to your friends

- Streamlined book recommendations to friends

- Easily track reading goals and books you've read

And many more...

It's completely free and easy to use, and we would love your feedback as you explore the platform.

[hombre_fatal]

I once was part of a now-defunct reading forum in my teens.

On the forum, people would package three related books into quests. A boring example would be a dystopian quest pack with three books about three very different dystopian scenarios.

But the quests people put together were usually more interesting. I remember a "Weird Magic" quest had books with really unconventional magic systems. I found Motherless Brooklyn (detective with Tourette's) in a quest pack of "heroes with issues". Other quest ideas would be evil protagonists, alien first-contact with the wrong guy, and stuff like that. You can often find three books for even the goofiest of quests.

It was a cool way to find new books. And whenever you didn't know what to read next, you'd look at what quests you were still working on and choose among them. Once finished, your completed quest count would increase.

Long append-only lists of genre-related books were never as interesting to me. Quests only having three books made them a fun thing to collect. Maybe there's something fun there that new goodreads competitors can experiment with.

[randomcatuser]

Oh this is so neat!! Thanks for the idea

Anyone want this? Can have it up in March

[skeaker]

That's a really fun and interesting concept! The way that quest names can be more specific than broad genres while still encompassing several books is great, because you kind of know what you're getting into without giving away the whole book. "Weird Magic" makes me want to look deeper immediately because that alone is a great hook. (If you happen to recall what the Weird Magic books were, I'd love to know!)

[JustAndy]

This exact thing happens on r/suggestmeabook, but I'm not sure it happens that often.

[nicbou]

This is a great idea. I often go on a month-long tangent of related books, films, podcasts and articles. Currently it's the space race and the war in Afghanistan. It would be cool to have "an introduction to _____" lists for this.

[justinberding]

Love this idea. Gamification of reading is something people have dabbled with for awhile; would be great to eventually build in something like you mentioned.

[paxys]

This is great but I'm not going to sign up just to see what the site looks like. There's no reason for a large part of the functionality (book info, ratings, reviews) to be behind a login wall. As it stands right now Goodreads is a lot more open.

[drusepth]

I signed up. This is what the site looks like:

* Dashboard/feed: https://i.imgur.com/bUGZX27.png

* Book page (from search): https://i.imgur.com/9BQK7hF.png

* Bookshelves (adding a book is just a modal on this page): https://i.imgur.com/sHzorJE.png

* "Community": https://i.imgur.com/nzI9FNZ.png

* Profile: https://i.imgur.com/kcxitYb.png

There isn't a lot of content to showcase, but the screenshots on the homepage (at https://www.booqsi.com/) seem to show off each of the currently-available pages. It'd be nice to have some kind of search to see book search result pages for yourself without signing up, but honestly there's not much to see (yet?). You can see for yourself: https://app.booqsi.com/books/9781408865446

[yosito]

This 100%, if you can't show me your site/app without collecting my personal information, it's a dark pattern, and I'm not interested in using an app that leads with a dark pattern.

[justinberding]

To be honest, if you're looking just for book info, ratings, and reviews, Booqsi probably isn't the right site for you anyways. It's specifically meant to be a social platform, not a ratings or reviews site, which is why we don't actually have give users the ability to do either.

We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your community about books, with the underlying motivation that a book recommendation from a friend (or seeing what their favorites are) is inherently more powerful than a random review online.

Having a login and simple profiles that represent your person seemed like the bare minimum for a social platform to function. Also worth noting... we're trying the magic link approach for logins, so a one-time email input is all that's required.

[impalallama]

signed up and the rating system is borrowed wholesale from google books and there are no reviews at all; so rating and reviews are not even a feature (yet?). not a good look, i'd love an alternative to goodreads but not even having a basic rating system is kinda defeats whatever purpose this site might be going for

[urthor]

It's not just a usability issue.

OP, you need to deliver lots of public value to customers who haven't converted yet.

Always remember. "3 free articles a week" isn't you giving your stuff away.

It's marketing that costs you nothing.

Free marketing. Keep repeating it to yourself. Free marketing.

[emsixteen]

Can't sign up without providing a surname, either. Literally the first step after the magic login link, and already at a hurdle I'm not going to pass.

[lacker]

Very interesting... some feedback.

So I search for "Proust", and the top 8 results are not Proust. Since Proust has one extremely famous book, I thought it would show up, rather than a bunch of different commentary on Proust.

So I finally find the page for In Search Of Lost Time. However, it says none of my friends have read it. Well, of course not - I don't have any Booqsi friends yet. So, there's just nothing I can do on this page.

Next I looked for The Power And The Glory. At least this page has a summary of the book. But, also none of my friends read it, and there's nothing I can do here.

Next, Consilience. Same thing. Basically I search for a book, I get maybe nothing, maybe a summary, and then there's nothing else I can do on that page.

So, I want to like this site, but I'm just finding nothing I can do here.

Personally, I love books but I hate Goodreads. I just don't care that a hundred thousand random people prefer The Twilight Saga Complete Collection to The Death of Ivan Ilych.

I would be really interested to read a well-written paragraph that said, hey, if you like Nabokov and Borges, then you might like this other author. That sort of recommendation is what I occasionally get from reading blogs or tweets from people with a similar literary taste to mine, and it's very useful, I find most books through some sort of recommendation.

Goodreads has this mistaken idea that I care about the average person's opinion of a book. A book is not a can opener. Everyone wants to open a can, everyone opens cans in the same way, everyone appreciates a can opener that successfully opens cans.

Anyway, I hope you do succeed in building a Goodreads alternative, because I would love to spend more time reading about books, reading good books, discussing books, and Goodreads is just not providing that experience.

[justinberding]

Thanks for the feedback! The book's info page doesn't have a lot going on, except to see some info about the book (or add it to a shelf, or recommend it to a friend) and see if any of your friends have read it.

Your comments about Goodreads and the average random person's opinion is spot on and one of the inspirations for wanting to build something new. I noticed that its my actual friends and family -- not necessarily a random person -- that have the biggest impact on what I read next. A book rec from a friend you respect goes a long way. Booqsi is attempting to harness some of that.

[nosedrip]

some great books you're mentioning here, I'd love to see your recommendations in an app like this, perhaps we'd need to move away from an algorithmic recommendation system, but rather influencers based on 'moods'? There is a radio station that works like this NTS, they even claim "not curated by algorithms", but still scalable and solid music. I love this concept.

[o_____________o]

tastedive.com?

[karaterobot]

I'm glad another site for book lovers exists, and I wish you well!

But I think it's sad that Librarything has such poor marketing and branding that nobody ever thinks "well, there already is a better, cooler replacement for Goodreads, and it doesn't cost anything". It's been around for 17 years, has 2.6 million users, and very few people know about it.

[pessimizer]

I always thought Librarything was also bought by Amazon.

later: According to some pretty stale info on Wikipedia, Abebooks bought 40% of Librarything in 2006, and Amazon bought Abebooks entirely in 2008.

edit: https://blog.librarything.com/2008/08/abebooks-news-the-scoo...

https://www.librarything.com/topic/152033

> At the same time, it's well known that Amazon has an indirect but real stake in LibraryThing—they bought Abebooks, who were our first minority partner. People keep reporting that Amazon has 40%. That's simply not true—it fails to take account of our second funder, Bowker. (I remain the majority; I can't say how the rest divides up.) But this certainly muddies the message. For what it's worth, I want LibraryThing to make more money, and therefore my, Bowker and Amazon's stake to be worth more and more, but with Amazon now holding 100% ownership of BOTH our competitors (Goodreads and Shelfari), we can hardly do so without emphasizing what sets us apart.

[arawde]

I think the reason is that LibraryThing is significantly less UX-friendly than Goodreads. I use both; I use Goodreads to track what I consider "personal" reading, and I use LibraryThing to track what I consider "technical", but the big reason I have it broken down like this is because LibraryThing is just not as friendly to a user as the alternatives.

[kwertyoowiyop]

Agreed. The name "LibraryThing" is like a people-repellent compared to "GoodReads." Names matter.

[BeetleB]

LT user for over a decade. I'll definitely stick to it as long as it maintains its feature set.

One of the nice things about it is its lack of decent AI (and they're open about it). They're not trying to hit those kinds of user engagement metrics.

[mrmuagi]

> sad that Librarything has such poor marketing

I did not know it even existed, I have imported all my books into it and will wean myself of Goodreads.

[mistrial9]

thx! - all I knew before today was to avoid Goodreads at all costs! my "cookie counters" went off the charts at Goodreads - I literally will not open a page there for any reason now.. same with that ubiquitous picture-collecting site.. pinterest.. toxic to me now.

[rsolva]

I use BookWyrm [0], which is not only social but decentralized (ActivityPub) and thus interoperable with other social networks like Mastodon. It's nothing fancy, it just works and it is nice to be able to follow (or share) quotes or reviews on books within the Fediverse.

[0] https://joinbookwyrm.com/

[lf-non]

As someone who has occasionally dabbled with fediverse, but never quite dived in, I have always found federated applications to be confusing from UX pov.

In this case, what does interoperability mean ? When I sign up for the service I see options to create profile with one of the instances - how to choose an instance is not very obvious from that page. Some instances have specific themes, others don't - should I choose based on how much my interest overlaps ? Based on reputation of who runs those instances ? What are the consequences if I make the wrong choice ?

Also, If I already have a mastodon account I can supposedly use that to participate in the discussions on BookWyrm. However I have no clue how to actually do that - any attempt to comment/like posts takes me to a login page which doesn't seem to have any support for connecting to Mastodon.

Until the UX improves for me to be able to make these kind of choices in a very short amount of time, I am more inclined to pick a traditional sign up and start using kind of service - and I'd assume I am not the only one.

[sugaroverflow]

Booqsi looks really pretty and I love that it supports local bookstores! Are there plans to support imports from Goodreads? I know many people who have curated their shelves for years so that might be an important feature for them to switch over.

I've been using and loving an alternative, https://www.thestorygraph.com/it has similar vibes to Booqsi and also includes a Goodreads import, AI based recommendations, and some mood-based book tracking (i.e tags like fast-paced, dark, emotional)

[hwers]

Are goodreads imports allowed? Isn't that kind of data sometimes against terms of service (for obvious anti-competitive reasons)?

[justinberding]

Yes! We realized pretty quickly that we need a way to import booklists (specifically from Goodreads), so we're actively working on that! Should be rolled out soon.

Yes, I've used StoryGraph as well, but felt like I needed something that provided a few more social features. The book mention feature of the social feed is one of my personal favorites with Booqsi.

[scantron4]

Storygraph also doesn't have an api, unfortunately. If they did I'd jump over wholeheartedly.

[softwarebeware]

I applaud the effort! The "Amazon-free" part is attractive, considering that many of us feel that Amazon's business practices are abusive of employees, anti-competitive, and unethical in other ways.

I have stopped using Goodreads already--probably for a couple years now. I found that the only feature I really used was the "To read" bookshelf. And I found that I just replaced it with a specific "To read" list of reminders in my iPhone's Reminders app. For that use case, this seems to work great for me. Can you speak to potentially any features of Booqsi that would be an improvement over my simple / non-book-specific approach?

[justinberding]

Thanks! Yes, having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first place.

You're not the first to use their Reminders (or Notes) app for book lists. If you're not interested in the social elements of Booqsi and just want to improve upon your current approach, a couple thoughts come to mind:

1. it's built specifically for books (unlike the Reminders app), so you'll be able to easily search for and add books to your "To read" shelf with the option to then "mark is as read" when you finished it, making it easy to track that aspect of your reading journey as well.

2. if you choose to buy it, it'll link you directly to bookshop.org to purchase it from a local bookstore instead of Amazon.

Now, if you wanted to elevate your experience, I feel like the social aspects of Booqsi is where it shines. For example:

1. if a friend drops you a book recommendation, it'll automatically add that book to your Books Recommended to Me shelf. If you like that book, you can move it to your "to read" shelf, or just go buy it. I've found it makes tracking book recs so much easier.

2. anytime someone in your community mentions a book, it'll come through your feed; you can then easily take action from it by navigating to the book's info page, adding to a shelf, going to purchase it, etc.

Those are just a few that come to mind! Regardless of if you want to use the site independently of others or engage more socially with others, there's something for everyone.

[uo21tp5hoyg]

Luckily I signed up with fake data as it seems your profile search api returns full profile data not just data to be displayed, which includes the users full email address and whatever a stream token is. As far as I can tell there's no indication that this data is intended to be leaked.

I'm also not a fan of the raw queries to google, moving my data away from amazon and on to google doesn't seem like a step up.

[stolenmerch]

I seem to be one of the few people here who likes Goodreads and uses it daily. I have no compelling reason to switch, but Booqsi looks gorgeous and fast, so I was interested in trying it out. I know it's early days, but a few things stand out.

Overall, the data seems a bit messy. I tried adding a few books from my currently reading list on Goodreads and ran into some problems. The first book I tried to add had a duplicate entry. Both had identical metadata but are separate records; if I marked one as finished it didn't update the other. Many books seem to be missing editions, alternate covers, subtitles, and other important details. Other times multiple editions seem to be split out as separate titles but with no clue to edition. This gets confusing fast for certain types of books.

It seems difficult to find people to follow. Everything looks to be private by default so I couldn't find people based on the books they read. The "people who read it" feature does not seem to work as expected. It seems it doesn't include books currently being read or books simply put on a favorite shelf without marking it 'read' - either that or I'm locked out of seeing what people I don't follow are reading. I have to follow them first? As it stands, I don't know anyone personally on Booqsi, so I'm relying on following interesting strangers based on reading habits, which I can't seem to do. It's doubtful my friends who already don't use Goodreads very much are going to switch, so I'm looking for Booqsi to be more like a "twitter for books", which it currently isn't without the option to be public.

A couple more books didn't exist and I didn't see an option to add it. I assume some crowdsourcing option like Goodreads is on the roadmap for Booqsi though.

[yrral]

There was a recent great podcast interview of How I Built This with the goodreads founders. I would strongly recommend listening.

IIRC they talked about the early days, reasons for selling to amazon, being viral before that was a term, growing while being profitable, realizing they got more traffic than the New York Times did, why they thought their site was better than alternatives.

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/04/1078415544/goodreads-otis-and...

[finnh]

+1 to importing from Goodreads (and, also, from my Amazon digital content list aka kindle-purchased books). I'm happy to go through an export/import cycle for these, but starting from scratch on booqsi without a bootstrap sets the bar too high.

And I agree 100% with your core sentiment: Goodreads is weirdly low-value.

[justinberding]

Definitely a must. We're working on it; stay tuned!

[costcofries]

Very neat, about time someone tried to disrupt goodreads. Here's some thoughts:

- Get people to create a bookshelf as part of the onboarding experience, even with just a few books that they are reading, or have read. What you'll be able to do is instantly provide some recommendations. Finding new books is hard! You have a nice opportunity here to drive really valuable recommendations. Amazon doesn't know what's on your shelf, they know what you've bought or "saved" to buy, this is important.

- Get influencers to upload photos of their bookshelves and do the leg work of digitizing them. Heck, maybe even make this a feature and auto-magically digitize your users' bookshelves for them. Or even better, do some research and figure out what vertically specific influencers are reading, then manually create those bookshelves and accounts.

- 10% affiliate fee is not going to be enough, you need to figure out a much better way to make money, this will be your hardest challenge.

GL

[ZeroGravitas]

For less social readers, I find openlibrary good for tracking books I want to read.

They have a lot of data, some a bit messy but the depth and breadth is insane. They link to scans of crazy old books, ebooks of the classics, are happy to link out to libraries etc. have lots of weird and wonderful old textbooks and have open APIs and silly amounts of open data for book geeks.

[dybber]

Yet another alternative: https://www.booksloth.com/

What is your plan for monetization? I’m currently using StoryGraph and it seems it will survive through paid users, but I’m uncertain whether a site like yours will continue very long unless you start monetizing it.

[underyx]

Another alternative I've seen recently is https://oku.club/

[bobbytuck]

Meh.

Reading is a personal experience. I guess I understand the desire to make it more social -- but I'm not sure why I would go to the lengths to do so.

Is it some kind of gamification thing? I guess that's why I never got into Goodreads either.

I might be an outlier -- but I've never seen reading -- authentic, personal reading -- as anything other than personal.

I'm a social creature for sure, but I don't feel the need to share my reading lists. I always feel like social media is for creating a persona -- someone who want to be but aren't -- but want your "friends" to think you are.

This seems like it veers that way -- but I don't know. I didn't sign up -- but I was (obviously) curious enough to take a peek. And that probably says more about me than I care to acknowledge. :(

[justinberding]

I agree, reading by nature is very personal. Have you tried reading when you're surrounded by a group of friends talking? Yeah, hard to do. Doesn't really work.

But, where I've found the "social" element being important is more in helping me to determine what to read next (like a friend recommending a book to me), discussing books with others or sharing something interesting about what I'm reading, seeing what my friend's of family's all-time favorites are, etc.

The interaction comes in-between reading sessions and has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of books.

[personjerry]

There's one of these every other week. IMO "more social" and "Amazon-free" aren't the 10x improvements you need to compete with Goodreads

[Dave_TRS]

"more social" and "Amazon-free" may also not lend themselves well to bundling together. For me personally I'd love an Amazon-free version of goodreads that was built by someone who actually cared and updated it. The social stuff is a huge turn off though especially knowing it is being forced on the user judging from the other comments here

Reminds me of Brave browser that lumps "privacy browser" with "browser stuffed full of weird crypto crap", the latter I could do without.

[NelsonMinar]

Impressive! It's a lot of work building a product like that.

Please support export of a user's data. I just lost all of my Goodreads data when some system problem of their's deleted all my data. I'm pretty mad about it, but at least I had a data export from eight months ago so not all is lost.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503465

[justinberding]

Sorry to hear that you lost all of your data. That's rough. We're starting first with an import feature so that you can move all of your data into Booqsi, but an export feature is a natural follower to that. You should see both before too long!

[erikwiffin]

Ironically, the feature that keeps me from using Goodreads is that I want it to be less social. Do you have the option for private bookshelves?

[slickdork]

I'm glad someone's making this! I've been wanting an alternative for a while. I do have two questions:

1) Why can't I browse the site without an account? Is this temporary for the beta phase or a persistent design choice?

2) Do reviews allow GIFs? (I'm not willing to make an account just to see if existing reviews have gifs, and oddly enough, gifs would be a deal breaker for me).