AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to All books mentioned on the recent Ask HN best books thread
I spent a lot of time going through the recent thread: Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756432) so I made this website to browse through it later and get the books I want from Amazon. It gets the comments using the HN API, uses the Open AI API to extract book names, and then the Amazon API to find the book on Amazon.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. All books mentioned on the recent Ask HN best books thread launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AB
After reading this Ask HN post [1] (and buying too many books), I found myself going through old posts about book recommendations. I wanted to find all books recommended in those posts and save the top ones for future book shopping sprees. This has been done before [2, 3], but I wanted to get books that were recommended, not just mentioned. I used the Algolia API [4] to get all Ask HN posts about books, reviewed them and filtered out ones that were too specific e.g best books to learn math. The comments were then sent to the Open AI API [5] to extract books that are recommended. I then…
2024 · hackernewsbookrecommendations.com · its alternatives →
- 2MB
2020 · mapfilterfold.com · its alternatives →
- 3SW
Hi HN, Every year, we ask thousands of readers (and authors) to share their 3 favorite reads of the year. Now you can enter a book/author you love and see what books readers loved who also loved that book/author. Try it here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 This goes wide and doesn't try to limit itself to the genre, so you get some interesting results. What do you think? Background: I want better recommendations based on my reading history. I'm incredibly frustrated with what is out there. This system is based on 5,000 readers voting on their 3 favorite reads…
Dec 2025 · shepherd.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Bookstash▲512Get the essentials of top books in under 3 minutes
2021 · bookstash.io · its alternatives →
- 5YH
HN Books collects, ranks, and showcases the best books that have been recommended on Hacker News.
2021 · yahnd.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · its alternatives →
- 7
BingeBooks▲98The book bingeing site to find your next great read
2022 · bingebooks.com · its alternatives →
- 8
A collection of the best reddit AMA's
2016 · hellanzb.com · its alternatives →
- 9
- 10RS
2017 · redditfavorites.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Amazon Charts▲164The top 20 most sold & most read books of the week
2017 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 12AA
The previous submission [1] didn't catch on, so re-trying with a less substantive title! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41680056
2024 · authorlens.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Book Flee▲60Compare prices of books from iTunes and Amazon easily.
2017 · bookflee.com · its alternatives →
- 14NS
2012 · hntopbooks.com · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16BM
I'm releasing BestSFBooks today: http://www.bestsfbooks.com I was inspired by this HN post from a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2978027 BestSFBooks ranks science fiction/fantasy books according to how many awards they've won or been nominated for. I included all the big ones (Hugo, Nebula, etc.) and also more obscure awards that I like such as SF Site Editor's choice. Once I had all the awards in there it was easy to start creating a New Book list based on award winning authors. I could tell the app was working as soon as I saw the two book lists on the home page.…
2011 · bestsfbooks.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Get top rated book recommendations using your voice
2017 · its alternatives →
- 18
Bookshlf▲97Your AI-powered book recommender to learn anything
2023 · everlearns.com · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20
Looking for new book series to read?
2016 · play.google.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Inspired book suggestions from real experts, not algorithms.
2016 · rifflebooks.com · its alternatives →
- 22
I read HN on my kindle as I find it useful for reading under sun(while walking in a controlled environment) and taking notes. I was running hntokindle.com to offer this as a service for others. But Amazon has recently made sending bulk emails to the Kindle impossible by requiring 2FA over registered Amazon email address for each item sent to the Kindle. Hence I've stripped down HN to Kindle code to enable local transfer to any e-book reader which supports .mobi format and made the project open-source.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24
Also compare
- All books recommended on Ask HN alternatives
- Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads alternatives
- See what readers who loved your favorite book/author also loved to read alternatives
- Bookstash alternatives
- YaHNd – HN Books: The Best Books of Hacker News alternatives
- I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →