Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Crunching 1,200 Authors' Favorite Reads of 2023
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…
Shepherd.com is a book discovery platform that collects reading recommendations from authors and experts. The site aggregates data from a 2023 survey of over 1,200 authors about their favorite reads, organizing… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Crunching 1,200 Authors' Favorite Reads of 2023 launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1S3
Hi all, creator here :) - I launched Shepherd.com (https://shepherd.com/) 3 years ago on Hacker News and have added a ton since then! Here is the original Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660). I’ve interviewed 10,000+ authors & experts to get their 5 favorite reads around different topics, themes, and moods. And I’ve connected those so that you follow your curiosity around topics, authors, books, and more. Try Art Kleiner’s favorite reads on understanding AI and its effect on people:…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 2SC
2021 · shepherd.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
Like wandering the aisles of your favorite bookstore.
2024 · shepherd.com · its alternatives →
- 5IS
Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…
Nov 2025 · book.sv · its alternatives →
- 6MB
2020 · mapfilterfold.com · its alternatives →
- 7
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What the 1% of the 1% recommend
2022 · mostrecommendedbooks.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Verified book recommendations from people we look up to.
2020 · readthistwice.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Timeless internet writing
2023 · readsomethingwonderful.com · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12
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The network graph that holds all the wonderful reads I've ever found on the internet.
2022 · prashantbarahi.com.np · its alternatives →
- 15
Like wandering through the best bookstore in the world.
2021 · shepherd.com · its alternatives →
- 16RM
2021 · reclist.me · its alternatives →
- 17RS
2017 · redditfavorites.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie! The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs. My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this…
2023 · boredreading.com · its alternatives →
- 195A
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a project that I've been working on the last few days that I finally finished last night: https://50books.org This is a simple site designed to track your reading list into 2015. My personal goal is to read 50 books this year, and I wanted to hold myself accountable. Major sites like Goodreads are great, but were too much of a social network for my personal taste; on the other hand, using a text file (which was my 2014 solution) was too difficult to track and share. I built https://50books.org using Sinatra, sqlite3 (via datamapper), and…
2015 · its alternatives →
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- 22IB
2023 · modernserial.com · its alternatives →
- 23IM
2020 · makerreads.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi guys, yesterday I launched a new book notification service called 'Any new books?': http://anynewbooks.com The idea is that you enter your email, subscribe to a few categories of your interest, and then you'll receive one weekly email per category with a list of new interesting books that were just released. The first day was pretty good I think, with many people signing up. Among these, I've already spotted a few key players in our industry (which I take to be a positive sign, of course) and the feedback I've been receiving by email has been very positive so far. I'm posting this here…
2010 · anynewbooks.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Shepherd 3.0 – Like wandering the aisles of your favorite bookstore alternatives
- Shepherd.com – Discover books in a new way, like wandering a bookstore alternatives
- See what readers who loved your favorite book/author also loved to read alternatives
- Shepherd 3.0 alternatives
- I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model alternatives
- Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads 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 →