HACKER Q&A
📣 bcherny

What app do you use for book recommendations?


I’ve tried Goodreads and StoryGraph, but neither gives good recs. It seems like an easy problem to solve: just look at the authors I like, and recommend books that other people who have similar tastes also liked (ie. k-means matching). Is there an app that does this?

For example, I like:

- Greg Egan - Ted Chiang - Nabokov - Kerouac - Ishiguro - Vonnegut - Bukowski - Kundera - Joan Didion - Oliver Sacks

Surely if you get a list of favorite authors like this from a few hundred people, you could trivially recommend new authors to people?

  👤 dredmorbius Accepted Answer ✓
Bibliographies of books I find useful, for nonfiction.

Specific author recommendations.

The related-books adverts at the end of many books.

Literary magazines within genres of interest.

Book reviews: NY Times, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, etc.

Catalogues. Worldcat's been considerably enshittified in recent years, but remains useful. Open Library is increasingly appropriate.

ZLibrary's recommendations tend to be surprisingly useful, though it's harder to access these days.

👤 cpach
My sources for book recommendations are mainly newspapers, magazines, friends, Fediverse and HN.

Whenever I want to save a recommendation I just add it to Pinboard, with the tags ‘book’ and ‘wislist’.

So when I feel the urge to order new books I just look at those tags and order some.

👤 0x54MUR41
I am not really sure if these are considered apps. I usually use these websites to get book recommendations.

* Hacker News Books - https://hackernewsbooks.com, the weekly most mentioned books on HN

* reddit reads - https://www.redditreads.com, the books that Reddit users are reading

* Shepherd - https://shepherd.com, the book recommendations from authors, creators, and experts.

I found interesting books from blogs sometimes.