Alternatives
Products that do what Crunching 1,200 Authors' Favorite Reads of 2023 does
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…
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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
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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
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2021 · shepherd.com
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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
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2020 · mapfilterfold.com
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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
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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
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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
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2023 · modernserial.com
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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
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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
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Hey HN! I built a little side project I wanted to share. Shelvy is a free, visual bookshelf app where you can organize books you're reading, want to read, or have finished. Sign in to save your own collection. Not monetized, no ads, no tracking beyond basic auth. Just a fun weekend project that grew a bit. Live: https://shelvybooks.com Would love any feedback on the UX or feature ideas!
Jan 2026 · shelvybooks.com
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Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there).<p>The problem: paperback/print always wins over digital and arguably e-ink. Our solution: make reading a unique and asynchronously social experience.<p>I've love to get some beta feedback and…
2012 · hyperink.com
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Would love any feedback
Sep 2025 · rhomeapp.com
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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.
2024 · hnbestbooks.pages.dev
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There's lots of improvements I'd like to make but thought I should get some feedback first to see if anyone's interested in it. The main page just shows the most recent feed items (currently from only the 3 feeds I've added myself), but the idea is that it'll show the most popular items aggregated from all users. It also provides TLDR summaries for each item, based on word frequency. http://bayfig.com EDIT: Typo
2010
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There are two parts for this project: 1) The LLM-powered pipeline to extract citations (books + authors) from books and resolve them using both Wikipedia and Goodreads with offline copies I have. The result is data associating Books/Authors to other Books/Authors with accurate bibliographical information spanning centuries. 2) A WebGPU + D3.js powered visualization tool written by Claude Code so I'm able to deal with all this data on the browser on a more or less comfortable experience for the viewer. I spent some months on a off with this project, and definitely the most…
Feb 2026 · thiagolira.github.io
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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
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →