Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my spare time project, Booklends.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my spare time project, Booklends.com

booklends.com

27 pointsbhousel15 comments

Before people ask, yes I do know about the other sites that are very similar to this.

I got the idea around New Years and have been building it in my spare time. Even after other Kindle book lending sites launched, I figured I may as well finish mine anyway!

Edit: Wow HN, you killed it! I'm upgrading the Linode now. If you can't get through, just try again later, thanks!

anything different about your site? Are you targeting a specific niche to get more of a certain type fo book or anything?

BTW, congrats on completing something, always a learning experience to get anything out there I think.

Thanks! Yeah I learned lots working on this project. I've got a bunch of other things planned too.

There's nothing intentionally different about my site from the other ebook lending sites. I did try to make it as simple as possible. I have a feeling that there is space for a handful of sites like this, since Amazon did sell millions of Kindles this past holiday season. People may segregate themselves into communities of other like-minded readers.

Actually you don't need a Kindle device to borrow or lend the eBooks. You can read the books on your computer or other device (iOS, Android, Blackberry, etc).

I don't know much about the competitor sites so am asking out of interest as opposed to any professed insight (although I did buy my wife a kndle for Chrsitmas). It seems a smart approach (if it's not being done already) would be to pick a specific niche and become the 'kindle lending site of X'. That way you can get a reputation for having the most books about X available to lend at any moment. What that would ne I don't know. Or maybe look into book clubs, a lot of book clubs must read the same books a lot of the time, maybe seeding with a few copies of books from some celeb endorsed list could kick start a book club lending site?

Does the Nook have the same "lend once" restriction that the Kindle does?

Yes, both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have the same restrictions on lending:

You can lend a book one time for 14 days. You can't access the book while it is out on loan. Also, the book's publisher gets to decide whether or not the book is lendable in the first place.

The restrictions are limiting, but I am hoping that by building a community where people can offer up their books for loan, somebody out there will be able to loan you a book that you want to read.

I would make the Sign Up button big, bold, and colorful. Check out the download button on this page: http://www.phonegap.com/ (just an example, I'm not affiliated with them). See how it's big and colorful and really stands out. Also note that your logo shouldn't be larger than your call to action button. I have to search for yours.

That's one of the first things I want to fix when I get time.

I actually want to use the 'fancy buttons' gem (https://github.com/imathis/fancy-buttons) but I would have to switch the site over to using compass for my stylesheets.

Which isn't a bad thing, just not something I want to spend time on this week.

Coworker of mine wrote this: http://ubuwaits.github.com/css3-buttons/ (no need for sass/compass)

Change your copy to “Log In” and “Sign up Now”. Make the links stand out more.

Lending Kindle books is non-obvious. Make an FAQ or a walkthrough. Make the copy something like this: “Don't know how to lend or borrow books on your Kindle? Find out“ The “Find out” part should be a button. Then once you're done with your explanation, make another call to action, “Get started today!”

Get people engaged with your content on the front page. Look at Amazon's book section. They don't just start off by just listing books #1 to a billion. Put in some lists or categories, like top 10 books. Spotlight some popular books on the front page.

Replace the “Find” link with "Browse" or "Explore", and make it stand out more. Put a search bar on every page.

Put more decision-making information in the rows. Import the star ratings, user reviews, and some content information from Amazon.

In Chrome, on your sign up and log in pages, the https has a red slash through it warning that the page contains unencrypted resources.

From a user perspective, I'd like some signs that people are actually using the site and lending books before signing up. Maybe consider featuring user activity on the front page (seed it with some friends if need be) and seeing how that changes your conversion ratio.

Did we kill it? I'm getting:

  Ruby (Rack) application could not be started
  Failed to connect to a master node at localhost:27017 (Mongo::ConnectionFailure)

haha yes, you killed it :) It's back up now on a more powerful VPS, thanks for being patient..

Edit: By the way, if you get the "We're sorry but something went wrong" 500 message, that's just because Amazon's API isn't responding. It's limited to a (kinda low) 2000 queries/hour, and even though I do cache the most common searches, being on the front page of HN pushes it over that limit..

If this gets traction, how long until Amazon blocks your referral account? I hope they don't, but isn't this the most recent precedent?

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