Alternatives
Products that do what I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model does
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…
- 14H
2021 · hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app
- 2IB
Since 2005, Goodreads has been the default book tracking site, connecting millions of readers. But let’s be real—it’s barely changed in 20 years. It’s the same site it was, just with more ads. Still no half-star ratings. No proper DNF (Did Not Finish) option. UI still looks like it's from 2005. Amazon owns it and doesn't care. So I built Kaguya, a modern alternative, over the past 9 months. What’s live: Custom shelves (Organize however you want) Rich-text reviews (format your thoughts properly) 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars) DNF, On-Hold, and other reading statuses Likes,…
2025 · kaguya.io
- 3IM
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
- 4AM
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…
2022 · booqsi.com
- 5MB
2020 · mapfilterfold.com
- 6IM
Hello HN, I noticed that I often looked for new books, depending on my mood (e.g., if I'm feeling tired, I want to find books that'll help me fix that and improve my sleep). So, I created my 1st indie project, BooksByMood. BooksByMood will help you find your next read based on your mood w/ - Books averaging 4.09/5 on Goodreads - Each book comes with an explanation of why it's selected for your mood - 18 moods to explore I hope you'll enjoy using the website, Cheers!
2024 · booksbymood.com
- 7IM
After a few weeks of programming a few minutes at the time, next to my full time job, I created this tool that helps you pick your next book from your long(er) want-to-read list. In essence, it is a table with filters and column sorters. My problem was that the Goodreads website does not allow you to filter multiple columns at a time. That is why I created an alternative way to go through your books. Unfortunately, Goodreads no longer shares API keys, so it relies on its export functionality for a csv file. Not all the required information for your book search is present in this CSV file. To…
2025 · nextread.info
- 8TB
So far I've used it to reference ideas from books I've read before. I've also used it to explore books I have not read before by asking the bot questions. Some people have told me they use it like a reading companion. They pause while reading the book if they have a question, and use Konjer to answer it.
2023 · konjer.xyz
- 9GD
2020 · github.com
- 10S3
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
- 11AB
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
- 12SW
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
- 135A
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
- 14
- 15
- 16AO
Hi HN! I've been working on BookWith, an open-source e-book reader that integrates AI as your reading companion. The problem: Traditional e-readers are passive. When you encounter something unclear, you have to context-switch to search for it. Your highlights and notes remain isolated, and you can't easily connect ideas across different books. My solution: BookWith embeds an AI that maintains full context of what you're reading. It features: - Context-aware AI chat: Ask questions about the current page/chapter and get instant answers - AI podcast generation: Automatically converts book…
2025 · github.com
- 17AC
I built ProRead to prevent stalling on long passages and to keep the overall context clear. Features * Bird’s-eye overview with drill-down to any level * Interactive maps showing concept links * Quick switch between chapter summaries and original text * Contextual AI Q\&A * Text-to-speech for any book or summary level * EPUB upload for instant access Includes nine classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) and support for your own books. I arrived at this by piecing together LLM-based workflows for reading until I decided to build a dedicated tool. Feedback welcome.
2025 · proread.ai
- 18RA
Hey HN! I built ProRead to solve the problem of getting stalled by walls of text in books or losing the big picture while reading. Key features: • Start from a bird's-eye view, then zoom into any level of detail • Interactive knowledge maps show how concepts connect • Seamlessly navigate between chapter summaries and original text • Ask questions in context with AI assistance • High-quality text-to-speech for any book, any level of summary • Upload any EPUB and start reading immediately We have 9 curated classics (Wealth of Nations, Crime and Punishment, etc.) ready to explore, plus you can…
2025 · proread.ai
- 19RA
2021 · readow.ai
- 20IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com
- 21VH
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
- 221A
Hi HN! This is a personal project I finally got round to completing and shipping. It’s a simple feed of articles written by real people with interesting things to say. I wanted to explore some new technologies I haven't had a chance to try before, mostly rust and LLMs. As I browse HN each day I find myself most drawn to the content on personal blogs: people who have interesting things to say, from their own point-of-view, on a whole range of topics. Rather than being interested in particular topics, I’m more interested in reading from interesting people. This isn't a particularly new idea,…
2024 · 100kb.danhill.is
- 23AB
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
- 24IM
2020 · makerreads.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →