On a playful note, since I've seen a couple "YC reject" tagged launches, I thought I'd label mine "YC wasn't-even-submitted".
In any case, the idea comes from something that Phillip Greenspun wrote, which sums up what I think of some (but not all) business books:
"This book illustrates a fault in the publishing industry. If you have
a 50-page idea it is too long for a magazine. But it is too short for
a book. So if you wanted to get it distributed before the Web came
along, you had to drop in words until you reached 200 pages."
I wanted to create an open and collaborative site for business book summaries. There are already sites out there that charge between 100-200 USD a year for a stream of summaries, but that has two problems:
- Of course, it prices many people out of the market.
- More importantly, I want to create a place where people can discuss these books. Reading something is only part of learning. Going out and actually doing something is probably the best way, but being able to discuss ideas is also pretty helpful.
So... the result was this site, which I put together pretty quickly. I had fun adding a few summaries (I found that writing down what I'd learned from a book forced me to think about it a bit more), got a few friends to add others, and here we are.
By signing up for the site and working on a summary or two, you get a link back to your own site, as well as a link to your amazon wishlist, with encouragement to visitors to spring for a book or two for people who have worked on high quality summaries.
Constructive comments/suggestions/whatever more than welcome!
I spent some time navigating around and I have a few suggestions:
- You make me scroll too much, why not put ratings/voting on the right, instead of having them "downstairs"?
- I'll say this again: you need a designer.
- Too much data at once: why not have two tabs for each book? (summary/discussion) Similar to wikipedia.
- You can start a small marketplace right away: give people "offer this book for sale" option.
Designer: You're right, of course. I'd like to have someone to work with, but I can't pay right now, so it'd have to be someone coming on board to work on this and other sites for equity. I'd like that, but even then the person needs to be a good fit. Anyone here is welcome to get in touch with me and talk. Beyond that, thank you for the specific discussion points. That helps my "engineer-visual-design" brain target concrete things that I can improve.
- Moving the ratings/voting up is probably a good idea.
- A separate page for the discussion might risk making it invisible - the scenario I envisage is someone coming to the site, seeing a comment and feeling a need to respond to it because it makes sense, or is wrong, or needs responding too in some way. But if that's all burried under a 'discussion' link, it might not be so easy to find. Of course you're right that it doesn't (can't really) jump out at you right now because it's at the bottom of the page...
- book marketplace: I'm not convinced - that's Amazon's business, and I have no hope of competing with them. I do have a shot, I think, at creating a place for people to come and discuss the books, because their review/comment system doesn't really foster that kind of interaction, and I'm targeting a niche that is small/concentrated enough that I have a chance at prevailing.
Speaking of Phillip Greenspun and books, he writes outstanding Amazon reviews. His profile page is an excellent resource for anyone looking for random books to peruse.
I'd add my voice to the chorus - get a designer. I'd caution AGAINST the elance route. Design is an iterative process-- very few designers hit the nail on the head the first time. Design, test/get feedback, rinse, repeat. And, of course, design isn't just slinging pixels around-- it's designing the user experience (which might require changing your code).
Of course, a cheap "coat of paint" wouldn't be a terrible thing, if you can't afford a more gold-plated solution (or attract a designer-cofounder).
I second that. Great functionality, but it suffers from engineer-visual-design. For a couple hundred bucks on elance you could get a much more elegant design. To be honest it has the layout of a lot of spam sites (lots of links, centered text) and you'll lose some users very quickly on that aspect alone. But really great functionality - keep up the good work!
Cool, cool. The statistic "12% of this site's users have read this book" struck me as really interesting. Based on how well read stuff is, you essentially get a "must-read" list for free. That might be a cool feature for folks.
Yes, it's similar, but more focused on business books, and my goal is also to try and create more of a comunity aspect, with discussion of the books in question.
Note, also, that wikisummaries, from all I can tell, is not part of the wikipedia group of sites, but they're rather cleverly piggybacking on the name.
They're ranked by sales, so the more popular ones show up first. Usually the first one is the best. I should put some instructions to that effect. Go ahead and use the first one if you want to have a crack at it.
There are a number of other sites that do business book summaries:
- getabstract.com
- bizsum.com
- summaries.com
What I'm attempting to do is change the model a little bit. They all have professional reviews, and charge a lot of money for a number of summaries every year. For people who are willing to pay, they may even offer better summaries, although the standard format might be a bit limiting.
But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything else beyond getting the summary itself. My reasoning is that people will be interested in the summary, but get more out of being able to discuss the ideas presented.
'... But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything else beyond getting the summary itself ...'
Amazon does this. It was the subject of that great book (Amazonia, Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut ~ http://tinyurl.com/364d9f ) and tells the story of Bezos hiring employee #55, 'James Marcus' as book editor asking him ... "how many 100 word reviews can you write in x minutes?" - The implication being he wanted to find ways to scale reviews beyond employees writing 100 word reviews.
".... why do computer users take time away from their own lives and work to help people around the world whom they don't even know? ..."
Now your 'stab' at this has a good chance of doing better, if you can solve the problem of why people write free documentation (supply) and allow the creation of something that people want to read (demand). The reviews at Amazon are 'ok' but lack follow-up. There's a great article I found on "Why Do People Write Free Documentation?" and some conclusions after asking a questionnaire that might answer some questions you have on this ~ http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/7062
As for the site, I like it. Signed up, got an account & checked a title, modified my bio. Pretty easy. Found the book I searched for ( http://tinyurl.com/34dsnb ) So if I write comments, add comments can I consume this data? Use it beyond going to a page? What I would like to see (more of) is
- choice of licenses (creative commons) to release any writing
- access to rss, atom feeds, collective & personal OR an API to query data
- access to stats on the books & reviews (titles, who wrote what, how many words)
All of which allow you to not only add to the site but add to the value of the data by consuming it in your own blogs, products etc.
Thanks for the feedback - it's a good feeling to see someone thinking about what I've started creating, and I appreciate it.
Amazon is certainly a giant that could probably wipe out both my site and some of the others in a minute if they chose. On the other hand, being so big means that they don't have the focus, so people go for the reviews, but that notwithstanding, there seems to be a thriving summary business, so I guess they're not satisfied with reviews, and that's understandable. Reviews are teasers and opinions on the merits of the book rather than attempts at faithful summaries of the book's key points.
Now, some of your points:
Licenses - yes... I've been mulling that over. The issue is of course how much control to give up. Too little, and perhaps people will be less interested in contributing. More data (what does everyone here think?) would be useful.
RSS/Atom is a high priority item to add - its usefulness is obvious. The question in my mind is what to create a feed for - new books added? Newly added books are at their most useless stage, because they don't have a summary just yet (hopefully one gets added soon, but still). It would be easy to add feeds for summary updates, but perhaps that would be sort of annoying for minor updates.
Stats are another area I'm working on. First and foremost is to visually display who contributed how much to any given summary, so that people can't just change a word or two and get marked as a contributor.
_Thumbs down on this. Facebook is not the new internet._
No, it isn't. However, if one's site is depends on social networking behaviors, like community-generated content, like this one is, it wouldn't hurt to use facebook's social graph to quickly generate content. Furthermore, as a suggestion, one could implement reddit and news.yc-style moderation on summaries, comments, and even authors to let the community decide quality books/reviews.
I actually differ pretty strongly on this point (and I plan on writing at length on it sometime). Just because Facebook's network stuff is relatively accessible does not make it the right choice for your site's social features. There are benefits to establishing the links that mean something to your website. I'm "friends" with a lot of people on Facebook, but I trust barely any of their book recommendations, just as one example.
The apps here (see below) don't look very businessy, and while the demographic I'm targeting isn't perhaps quite the same as existing summary sites, I don't think it overlaps a great deal with the lolcats type users, either. Are there "serious" facebook apps?
It isn't surprising that FB apps are not very serious, since FB is in its formative stages as a "real" website (one that is used for serious things, for arbitrary values of serious). I think that if facebook keeps growing like it is now, we will see the introduction of serious apps that in turn will attract more users, etc etc. Remember, 10 years ago no-one thought the internet will be used for serious things.
I won't knock FB for the advertising upside. But those 100k won't really be users of the service, which is what you really want for something so community-centric.
How many people signup for sites like these, and return rarely or never use any of the registration-enabled features? Are those "real" users as opposed to FacebookApp-enabled users?
I add an app in my Facebook. If it's popular enough, every few days I get a bump in my newsfeed from a friend who's actually using the app (albeit within FB). Splash some ads on the landing pages or figure out a freemium model, and all of a sudden it starts looking like a real business (embedded via iframe/fbml!).
In any case, the idea comes from something that Phillip Greenspun wrote, which sums up what I think of some (but not all) business books:
"This book illustrates a fault in the publishing industry. If you have a 50-page idea it is too long for a magazine. But it is too short for a book. So if you wanted to get it distributed before the Web came along, you had to drop in words until you reached 200 pages."
I wanted to create an open and collaborative site for business book summaries. There are already sites out there that charge between 100-200 USD a year for a stream of summaries, but that has two problems:
- Of course, it prices many people out of the market.
- More importantly, I want to create a place where people can discuss these books. Reading something is only part of learning. Going out and actually doing something is probably the best way, but being able to discuss ideas is also pretty helpful.
So... the result was this site, which I put together pretty quickly. I had fun adding a few summaries (I found that writing down what I'd learned from a book forced me to think about it a bit more), got a few friends to add others, and here we are.
By signing up for the site and working on a summary or two, you get a link back to your own site, as well as a link to your amazon wishlist, with encouragement to visitors to spring for a book or two for people who have worked on high quality summaries.
Constructive comments/suggestions/whatever more than welcome!