Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
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…
Book.sv is a website for book readers that offers personalized recommendations based on a model trained on over three billion Goodreads reviews. Users input a list of books to receive suggestions for what to read next.… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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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 · its alternatives →
- 2
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 →
- 3MB
2020 · mapfilterfold.com · its alternatives →
- 4
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 · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
- 6IM
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 · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
- 8S3
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 →
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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 · its alternatives →
- 10
Browser Buddy▲156Hey HN, thank you for being a part of the internet we love. We’re Arnav, Mo, Jeremy and we’re building an “Internet for-you page” that recommends blogs and essays based on your interests. Try it here (https://www.browserbuddy.com/)! We love to discover and learn from personal blogs, essays, and articles on the internet. But despite exciting advancements in language modeling, it’s felt harder to discover interesting links from real people. We believe there is untapped potential to use these language models as “curators” rather than “creators”. To explore this, we’re building a…
Dec 2025 · browserbuddy.com · its alternatives →
- 11SW
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 →
- 12RS
2017 · redditfavorites.com · its alternatives →
- 13
FindReads▲10I’ve always felt that most book recommendation engines are shallow, they either use tags or “people also liked” data. I wanted something that actually understands what you mean when you say “slow burn sci-fi with emotional depth” or “books like Harry Potter.” So I built FindReads . It uses GPT to interpret your prompt, queries for books, and returns real titles that fit the vibe. Stack: Next.js, OpenAI API, MongoDB, deployed on Vercel. It’s still a work in progress — the results are surprisingly good for some moods, weird for others, but I’d love feedback from the HN crowd on how you’d…
2025 · findreads.app · its alternatives →
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pipeRead▲102Hi HN, Piperead is a free web tool that uses AI to act as a personalized librarian. Instead of just genre tags, we use specific "personas" to generate recommendations. The goal was to make something simple, fast, and free. Because we achieved to keep minimum cost. The site is live at https://piperead.com We are trying to fine-tune the recommendation quality. Feedback on the UX and the recommendation relevance is very welcome.
Dec 2025 · piperead.com · its alternatives →
- 155A
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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Bookbot▲61Discovery tool from /r/fantasy community recommendations
2016 · bookbot.io · its alternatives →
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Track, organize, and *actually* remember what you read w/ AI
2024 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 19
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 · its alternatives →
- 20AC
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 · its alternatives →
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Bookshlf▲97Your AI-powered book recommender to learn anything
2023 · everlearns.com · its alternatives →
- 22
MyRead▲10Hi HN! I'm Ivan, a developer and avid reader who was constantly frustrated by the "what to read next?" problem after finishing a great book. I tried tracking books on my phone, but it felt clunky and unreliable—I worried about losing my data when switching devices. When I looked at existing online solutions, they felt overly complex and bloated for what should be a simple task. So I built MyRead: a fast, modern book tracker that's both private and persistent, running entirely in your browser. Core philosophy: your data belongs to you. Everything is stored exclusively in your browser's…
2025 · myread.space · its alternatives →
- 23
Book recommendations that don't suck. Magically disambiguate your weird taste in books, and see what worlds may unfurl before you.
2020 · abooklikefoo.com · its alternatives →
- 24IB
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 · its alternatives →
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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 →