I read this post on fixing Goodreads over the weekend and followed it up with this article about Goodreads’ negative impact on books. I started using Goodreads last year to help me track which books I’ve read, and while I don’t use it for the community at all, the user experience is quite frustrating at times. Things are clunky and not always responsive, and as mentioned in both pieces, the search functionality is horrendous. The book I’m searching for will pop up and then disappear if I type another letter, or only return the book if I type out the full title.
The second article directed me towards The Storygraph, a new Goodreads competitor that promises to be different than all their other competitors. I might try them out soon, but regardless of whether or not I do, hopefully Amazon doesn’t crush them at the first hint of success.
I bring all of this up since I recently came up with an idea for something that fits somewhere between its own product and a feature for a Goodreads-style product. The idea is simple - in addition to having a list of all the books you’ve read, are reading, and want to read, you also have a list of books that are on your physical (or digital?) bookshelf and are willing to loan. It could help neighbors share books and build the community through reading, creating an auxiliary, decentralized library to your neighborhood.
Users could decide against listing titles they don’t want to share and would be encouraged to loan books instead of selling them. I think that could strengthen the bond between loaner and loanee, though of course you could also have a system with demerits for losing or damaging a loaned book.
I’m sure something similar already exists - Craigslist isn’t far off and neither is Nextdoor - but I think there might be room for this idea somewhere. It could even extend to a few other types of goods, though then it might truly be getting into Nextdoor territory.
Some other things I’m reading:
- The Drunkard’s Walk
- Freiburg: Germany’s futuristic city set in a forest
- How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
- The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure (still working on this)
- Getting ML to Production
Not a lot of uplifting stuff in there, though the Freiburg piece was über cool (see what I did there?).
What I’m doing:
- Manually filling out the rest of my dataset for my NBA salary analysis
- Working on fantasy sports stuff
- Finally starting Bayesian Methods for Hackers
I might try to learn some woodworking stuff sometime. It seems pretty cool, but I have no clue how to do that and there’s some other stuff earlier on the to do list.
Quadratic Wizard
The quadratic wizard
He plays no pinball
Nor is he a lizard
Knows no swish and flick at all
Searching for the golden equation
Looking high and low through the stacks
For a book of the right persuasion
To provide the knowledge he lacks
The door busts open amidst a shroud of fog
An enemy appears, threatening to steal credit
A moment of inspiration with no analog
He drives back the enemy, crushes it
By throwing the books at hand
In wide, arcing parabolas
And exclaims “Oh my! It’s so grand!
I must only find the maxima”
Tumbling down his ladder and over to his desk
Writing numbers and symbols
His previously solutions all so grotesque
Whilst this one looked so nimble
Full of awe, he whispered
“That’s it - negative b, plus or minus the square root
of b squared minus four times a and c
all over two times a”
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