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Comment by opello | Hacker News Reader

A nice value in this format (since it discusses books) would be to have a comment or portion of the description dedicated to listing the books (or ideally the media) discussed to a list.

I added "The Bit Player" (Claude Shannon documentary from 2018) to my watch list as well as "Recoding America," "Chip War," and "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" to my reading list.

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What do you mean by this exactly? Like a list of all upcoming books we’ll discuss? If you’re curious, you can find that on our website at www.bookoverflow.io!

I think they mean that the description of the episode should have a list of books (and maybe other resources) that were mentioned in the episode itself.

Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. We’ll have to do that. We’ve been debating setting up Amazon affiliate links to the books in the episode descriptions. We were going to wait until we were a little bigger, but after today we might have to speed up those conversations, haha.

I can appreciate supporting the effort, but the "stickiness" of Amazon affiliate links seem pretty pernicious. I briefly tried to find a source for this and failed, but my understanding is that the affiliate can see any product purchased while the affiliation through the link is active, which is something like a 24 hour timeout or another link for a different affiliate is used. Maybe my perspective is out of date, if so my apologies, but that seems like a net negative contribution to personal privacy of viewers.

Edit: This video humorously discusses the "leakage" I think of as bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2PYgjgDdWg

Yeah, definitely not my area of expertise. We’ll need to explore it further and make sure there’s nothing sketchy before making a decision.

You can always provide two versions of each link (affiliate/direct)

Good idea. Now that I think of it, I've seen other creators do something similar.

This exactly, yes, thank you. Sorry for being vague.

Sorry, I didn't mean upcoming books, just the media discussed in the episode. Like the ones I mentioned adding to my watch/reading lists. It would have made finding them a little easier is all and could serve as value to the description since it's certainly the case that they were discussed in the video! :)

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