Why building a Goodreads alternative is not so easy…

This post may get a little technical in some places, but you might learn something about the world of book data! If you’ve ever been involved in a discussion about how subjectively bad some people think Goodreads is, whatever the reasons are, maybe because it’s slow, has bad recommendations, doesn’t get active development, or just simply because it’s Amazon owned – you may have seen […]

Following series

Following series

One of the first features I built for Bookhype was the ability to follow a series. This was important to me because it’s something I’ve been trying to do already on existing platforms, and I thought it would be amazing for Bookhype to do it properly. On Goodreads I have a shelf called series-to-continue. Any time I decide I want to “follow” a series, I […]

Email alerts are coming soon!

Email alerts are coming soon!

In case you missed it, we’re working on email alerts! This will be a weekly email that goes out to anyone that has “Email Notifications” enabled in their settings. It will feature two things: Books in your library that are releasing over the next week. Any books that have automatically been added to your library over the past week. This will be books in series […]

October & November 2020 science fiction & fantasy releases to preorder now

October & November 2020 science fiction & fantasy releases to preorder now

Beyond the Ruby Veil by Mara Fitzgerald Publish date: 13 October 2020 A dark, queer YA fantasy that’s perfect for fans of the Three Dark Crowns series and Wicked Saints. After Emanuela Ragno kills the one person in Occhia who can create water, she must find a way to save her city from dying of thirst. Emanuela Ragno always gets what she wants. With her daring […]

Beta launch & roadmap

Beta launch & roadmap

It’s been almost a week since we opened the Bookhype doors to beta testers, and it’s definitely been a fun and weird experience! It took me a while to get used to opening up book pages and seeing other peoples’ reviews! It’s wild! I’ve also been thinking a lot about what’s next. I have a pretty big list of things to do but I’m trying […]

Alpha launch & thoughts on perfection

On Sunday we opened the Bookhype doors to a few alpha testers. It’s definitely been a whirlwind of emotions for me. I’ve been working on Bookhype for months and it’s weird to finally be letting other people in on it. Suddenly all the imperfections are huge and glaring at me. We have duplicated records (editions not grouped into a work correctly), missing series information, some […]

Book data parsing woes

Book data parsing woes

Building Bookhype has given me an interesting look into the world of book metadata for the first time. My goals for Bookhype seemed pretty simple: Books by the same author should be correctly linked to the same author record, so that when you view that author’s profile you see all their books. Books in the same series should be linked to the same series record. […]

Delays and images

Delays and images

I’m feeling pretty frustrated that we haven’t been able to launch our beta yet. We’re still waiting on a few pieces before we can go live (even “beta live”) and I’m not sure when they’ll come through. Hopefully later this week! But in good news, we have book covers! We spent the weekend working on our automatic processes – collecting, sorting, and processing book data […]

We have a server!

A few days ago our server got provisioned and we’ve been tinkering with it ever since. We had a few teething problems, which took a few tiring hours of our time, but things are fundamentally working now! We’ve now mostly been testing deployments and running book imports. We’re working really hard on making the import process as fast as possible, because we’ll have a lot […]

Extracting series names from book titles – wins and failures

We’re still working hard on perfecting our code for removing series names from book titles. This definitely requires a lot of trial and error! Essentially our goal is to have three separate data pieces: Title of this book only. Name of the series it’s part of. This book’s position within that series. The tricky part is that the series name and/or position are often inserted […]