HACKER Q&A
📣 crossroadsguy

What is your Goodreads replacement?


It's almost unusable once you start dealing with shelves, multi-reads, challenges and all.

What is your Goodreads replacement, if there is one?

Self hosted or otherwise.

PS. Maybe except the plain text notes, pen and paper records, something with the vim, or the orgmode and the kind.


  👤 bwb Accepted Answer ✓
I am working on one that is aimed at book discovery by recreating the feeling of walking around a physical bookstore (but reimagined for the online world).

It is called https://shepherd.com/

I launched about 9 months ago we are slowly getting there :)

How does it work?

I ask authors to recommend five around a topic/theme (so every book on the website is personally recommended by an author who is passionate about it). So you get some great recommendations on things like:

The best books on artificial intelligence that are not full of hype and nonsense https://shepherd.com/best-books/no-hype-and-no-nonsense-arti...

The best books that tell a cautionary tale about world-changing technology https://shepherd.com/best-books/cautionary-tales-about-world...

The best books whose dystopian visions were eerily prescient https://shepherd.com/best-books/dystopian-visions

Then, I build out bookshelves (aka topic pages) using NLP. This is very new and only 30 days old so I am still improving the engine / topics. But, it is all tied to Wikidata so you can search via Wikipedia topic (and some other cool stuff down the road).

Bookshelf on artificial intelligence https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/artificial-intelligence

Bookshelf on neuroscience https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/neuroscience

Right now I am working to roll out a big improvement to the recommendation engine. And, then to integrate book genre data, which is a massive project. I want to be able to go to the World War 2 section and say "show me all historical fiction", or on the AI bookshelf to show me all "science fiction".

Let me know what you think :)


👤 atsushin
I'm trying out 26reads, though it's pretty new and doesn't have too many features yet. I like the UI though.

👤 msencenb
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