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Browse Amazon, Randomly

32 points| hmason | 13 years ago |bookbookgoose.com | reply

26 comments

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[+] gourneau|13 years ago|reply
I really love this! I opened it and just jam on the next key (n).

Use this little snippet to set it to auto-next mode, for a great screensaver. Edit - here is the screensaver https://github.com/gourneau/WebSaver

  setInterval(function(){$("#book_next").click()}, 500)
Watching all of books fly by is wondrous to me because it feels like it is painting some weird version of conscious reality.

Hilary could you please add this bit of code so for auto advancing mode via the query string.

  function getParameterByName(name) {
      var match = RegExp('[?&]' + name + '=([^&]*)').exec(window.location.search);
      return match && decodeURIComponent(match[1].replace(/\+/g, ' '));
  }

  if (getParameterByName("auto")){
	  setInterval(function(){$("#book_next").click()}, getParameterByName("auto"))
  }
It would work like this, where 500 is the number of milliseconds. http://www.bookbookgoose.com/?auto=500
[+] hmason|13 years ago|reply
Thanks. I just deployed this update. Have fun!
[+] crisnoble|13 years ago|reply
This is pretty awesome, it is amazing to see all the weird titles out there.

Is anyone else surprised by the amount of: "This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures..." books for sale on Amazon?

[+] Wingman4l7|13 years ago|reply
Google "Amazon ebook spam" and you'll see several articles about it -- their self-publishing system has really gotten hammered with it. In this case, it sounds like the content is just copied from the public domain.
[+] bertomartin|13 years ago|reply
Another thing, make an obvious link to the amazon page. something like "see it on amazon.com"
[+] logn|13 years ago|reply
And why not add your referral code too?
[+] strangestchild|13 years ago|reply
This is really great - love the idea. Just in case you hadn't spotted, I think there's a punctuation bug whereby characters are sometimes omitted, although it doesn't happen all the time. Not a big deal though.

Example:

Correctly punctuated original: http://tinyurl.com/b6sbozh

Bookbookgoose ignores the apostrophes: http://imgur.com/4U9Ow

[EDIT: Dropbox link was broken - using imgur instead]

[+] nathanb|13 years ago|reply
Fair warning: the first title that came up for me was NSFW.
[+] zipop|13 years ago|reply
That would have been good to know before I started clicking. DANG!
[+] jordanmessina|13 years ago|reply
Very cool. Somewhat similar to my book discovery app http://quotab.ly (discover via random quotes). Where did you end up getting your data? Did you scrape Amazon or are you using their API?
[+] hmason|13 years ago|reply
Both, actually. The API is too slow to use live for this app.
[+] untangle|13 years ago|reply
Love it.

Can you please add filters for "by-genre" and "kindle-only"? Please..

[+] whelps|13 years ago|reply
I understand where the name came from, but bookbookgoose just doesn't work for me. Its just too long and unwieldy for me. As for the service itself, I am not sure what type of customer this is servicing. Are there people out there that are trying to find random books to read without any context (i.e. subject matter, recommendations from others, etc.)? Now, I think this would be a lot more useful if you could perhaps do the random thing but filtered by some criteria that makes it relevant to the user. So, for example, I want to read about 'javascript' and I search through random javascript books. It would also help to display the amazon rankings and other stats.
[+] marquis|13 years ago|reply
it's probably a play on duckduckgo.
[+] felipebueno|13 years ago|reply
It's pretty cool! But I didn't like the name too =p... One more thing: 'n' and 'b' shortcuts not working on the Firefox (17.0.1).
[+] jaydub|13 years ago|reply
I like it, can you add random browsing within a category (e.g. I want to browse random humor books)