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Each week Adam & Ste focus on a specific feature, idea or prototype in Hardcover and iterate on it together or with guests.
Adam (00:01.23)
Hey, hey, stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.774)
Adam, pretty good, pretty good. Enjoying autumn, enjoying life, know, enjoying walks in my local park. How about you?
Adam (00:06.659)
You
Adam (00:10.84)
you
Adam (00:17.652)
well. We had our first snow of the season here so like all the mountains look beautiful and snow capped and luckily it didn't really settle much like on the ground in the valley so it's already kind of melted in the streets and everything so it just is a little bit chilly and looks really pretty.
Ste (00:37.078)
Wow, that's nice. I mean, for me November, like snow is wild. I mean, I usually like for most of my life, I mean for all my life, I didn't see that like growing up, maybe late December, but yeah, that must be nice. I feel like beginning to ski and like to like...
Adam (00:59.652)
Yeah, the ski resorts have, think they, excuse me, I think they are just opening up like last week and this week and probably more of them open up every week now, now that there's enough snow up in the mountains. I don't think I'm gonna go skiing this year. I was able to convince my wife to go skiing last year and it was like her first ever skiing lesson and.
Ste (01:13.75)
Yeah, that sounds great, yeah.
Ste (01:26.187)
Nice.
Adam (01:26.884)
I took a snowboard lesson, so I would be equally unprepared, because I've never snowboarded. But I think this year we're probably going to take a break, mostly because we had an offer accepted on a house earlier today. Thanks.
Ste (01:32.129)
You
Ste (01:43.991)
Really? Congrats! Wow! Wow, that's huge news! Yeah, I know what you are looking at, you know, I imagine how eventful the search must be. mean, big move, big move!
Adam (02:00.128)
Yeah, we've been looking for about two months, maybe three months. yeah, I think like as we've seen more and more places, we've kind of understood what we want even more and more in a house. And we're fortunate that a place came up on Sunday that we really liked. We saw it Sunday, put an offer Monday and now it's already under contract to close next month or early December.
Ste (02:29.142)
Wow, wow, okay, wow, that's very exciting. Nice, yeah, you heard it here first. That's great. So what's the process when you know you're definitely gonna move in?
Adam (02:31.587)
you
Adam (02:36.024)
You
Adam (02:44.076)
Yeah, I think we have two weeks to do like a inspection on it, do all that kind of due diligence to make sure the house is in as good shape as it seems. And then if that goes well, then the first week of December, we close on it and can start moving in before Christmas.
Ste (03:03.97)
Wow, that's great. I'm so happy. Is it like in Salt Lake?
Adam (03:05.316)
if
Yeah, it's only about a mile from our apartment. So it'll be a really easy move, especially since we're in an apartment. We don't have a terribly high amount of stuff. It's still enough furniture, things like couches and beds and the desks that I don't want to be carrying out. So I'm sure we're going to hire movers.
Ste (03:13.185)
Okay.
Ste (03:23.052)
Yeah.
Ste (03:34.802)
Yeah, I mean, from experience, I said the same thing and, you know, apparently, you know, there's a lot to move out, but you don't realize that until you pack it and you actually see it in boxes and you're like, shit, okay. This is more than I thought it looked like when it was in the house spread out. But yeah, that's amazing. Wow.
Adam (03:49.688)
Yeah.
Adam (03:57.11)
Yeah.
you
Ste (04:01.218)
That's gonna be like, well, around like Christmas when it's gonna, the movie's gonna happen.
Adam (04:07.18)
Yeah, think technically we'll have until like the end of January because of the way that we have to give notice in this apartment. But my hope is that we're completely out of this place by the end of the year if you know that everything goes through.
Ste (04:14.53)
Mm.
Ste (04:23.456)
Nice! That sounds great!
Adam (04:24.342)
And yeah, one thing that'll be really nice is like the room that I'm in now, this is our, this is my office, you know, my desk and my wife's office. And then it's also our guest room because this couch folds out to a bed and then we have our like Peloton. So it's also like our workout room. So, so yeah, it'll instead of sharing for like duties for a room in the new place.
Ste (04:37.186)
Yeah.
Ste (04:42.651)
here we go. Yeah, I know that one.
Ste (04:51.97)
Functions, yeah.
Adam (04:53.314)
I'll have my own office. Marilyn will have her own. And then we'll have a room for kind of Peloton slash guest room.
Ste (05:02.1)
that's great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my home is kind of like the same, especially, you know, with a kid, everything is happening in the same place. So it's kind of like the areas are drawn out, sometimes, you know, overlapping. And now it's like full of toys everywhere. So the toy area is the whole house. So yeah, I definitely get the need for like organizing and like compartmentalizing everything.
Adam (05:19.18)
Yeah.
Adam (05:25.891)
You
Adam (05:30.496)
Yeah, I imagine as soon as they're able to like, be like, the kids are able to be mobile and move their toys around, then it's just, you know, hard to control at that point.
Ste (05:41.684)
yeah, yeah, yeah, he's at the stage where he moves like everything around, like not even his toys, like stuff around, can't find stuff because he just takes them from somewhere and you find it like in the weirdest places. you know, that's, that's fun, you know, another mission to, to accomplish daily, find out stuff that's been like hidden in the weirdest places. Yeah, that's, that's nice.
Adam (06:04.6)
No.
Ste (06:08.47)
Nice. that kind of syncs well with what we're talking about today for hardcover. It's been interesting last year to see this happening here in books.
Adam (06:18.86)
I yeah.
Adam (06:29.666)
Yeah, yeah, last year we did this like very elaborate year in books, which was such a fun, fun project. I'm pretty sure that was kind of like the big project that took the last six weeks of the year last year. And in retrospect, getting it done in six weeks with how much development there was, how much research there was, and then we reached out to like a hundred authors to let them know that they were included in it. And we even like mailed out stickers to authors. It was...
Ste (06:56.247)
Yeah.
Adam (06:59.234)
It was a pretty big project.
Ste (06:59.424)
That was fun. Yeah, yeah it was. Yeah.
Adam (07:04.59)
So I'm excited to kind of revisit that and figure out like what we want in the 2024 year in books, both like that worked from last year and maybe like things we've learned that we could do better at for this year.
Ste (07:21.066)
Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. mean, it's been really fun having it as a project. And the upside is that now we have the whole structure and we have like a way better idea of what books we want to and what sections we want to include. So I think that was the like hard part last year, actually drawing up the content and how it's organized. So what actually, you know, we're gonna...
rank and how the ranking will be done according to what criteria. I think this year it's just like revisiting that and basically adding new things to it plus some visual improvements. know we had like a small controversy, let's say last year, because we used AI art and I don't know what's the feeling now. I feel like people have...
a bit more to AI art, you know, still with the same controversy. But yeah, maybe we can find like a solution to that this year around. So I'm hoping that, you know, we've opened up artist contributions and I know we're pretty small right now. So we're probably not going to get a lot, but.
Maybe for some sections we can actually think of a way to involve like real artists more and promote their work. I think that would be like very fun and really useful to do from both our end and, you know, whoever's getting featured from their end.
Adam (08:46.232)
Thank
Adam (09:03.892)
Yeah, yeah, that was the AI art one was a big one. And I feel like that's, that's one reason why I'm, I'm curious to kind of kick things off so early, because we're going to need more time this year for the art side. Cause last time we kind of just plug things into the mostly to midsummer and let that handle everything. But yeah, taking away that it's going to be a lot of back and forth between a lot of authors or a lot of artists. mean,
Ste (09:17.496)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (09:26.03)
huh.
Ste (09:32.766)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, we'll see how we'll do it. mean, I think like opening up the contributions and just saying that these are the sections and you can contribute with an artwork that is related to this. Or for instance, you have dark fantasy, for instance, top or dark romance books.
Maybe we can find an artist that does stuff in that style on that theme and just convince them to share an image with us that we can put over there. It's not going to be book specific. So last year we tried to make them book specific. And that ended up for some books being not so book specific. So we had like lots of hardcore fans for some of the books like Brendan Sandersons.
telling us, this is like nothing like the book. So we had to redo some of the images in the journey. So yeah, I'm curious how we'll handle it this year.
Adam (10:38.66)
You
Adam (10:42.52)
Yeah, I'll share my screen and we can kind of go through it here.
Ste (10:49.966)
Yeah. And you were telling me this, like, we're part of a huge, like, code migration and part of this code migration involves, like, moving all of our codes from something to, this new, from how it was to this new framework. Well, it's not really a framework, but let's say framework. Yeah. So, yeah, this is one of the pages you were telling me you've moved. So this is on the new, you know, the new setup.
Adam (10:54.82)
.
Adam (11:18.497)
Right, and yeah, it loads pretty fast. And it's like, it has, I think functionally this should be pretty much identical to what we left it as. I didn't make any changes, I don't think.
Ste (11:25.644)
Yeah, that's very fast.
Ste (11:36.824)
Yeah.
Adam (11:43.512)
Thank
Yeah, I think.
Adam (11:50.616)
I think so far, like in terms of sections, like.
Like, there aren't, like, I like all of these sections. I don't think there are any sections that I'm like, I think we should get rid of this.
Ste (12:06.67)
Yeah, they're pretty good. Well done us us 2023 2022 actually
Adam (12:09.112)
Yeah.
Adam (12:14.284)
Yeah, I'm trying to think like one of the things we talked about was having a like a hardcover stats one. So like things like like number of like hardcover users, number of reviews, maybe number of books read in 2024.
Ste (12:25.068)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (12:44.002)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (12:45.587)
Yeah, a number of reviews written in 2024.
Ste (12:50.88)
Yeah, maybe we can do something nice and even grab some of the reviews. So show the number and maybe in the background, know Revelry from our team made that nice animated box cover thing where the covers just drift like they're on a river. Maybe we can use that with.
Adam (12:56.708)
.
Adam (13:07.299)
Mm.
Ste (13:12.596)
actual reviews or with prompts or with just have them like slowly move in the background and just like grab the last, you know, popular reviews or the last submitted reviews on hardcover.
Adam (13:31.167)
I hadn't thought of using that for like moving text. I thought about it more for like moving covers.
Ste (13:38.414)
Yeah, yeah, you're right. Text might be a bit distracting. maybe we can find a way, maybe not animated, because you're right, it might be a little bit distracting. But maybe we can grab some reviews and just show coming and going.
Adam (13:56.772)
Yeah, or you can share like the book covers for reviews or something like that or.
Ste (14:00.878)
Or the book covers, yeah, just to make it more visual, like have the number, the numbers of the reviews. And I found a really nice library that also animates the number. I think you have one too as well, from what I remember talking a while back, but I'm going to show you what the one.
Adam (14:13.917)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (14:24.474)
I found as well and we'll see, you know, which one to use. I wanted to use it on the stats I'm currently working on. yeah, that's going to be for people who prefer motion, very neat to see them animated.
Adam (14:28.545)
Be cool.
Adam (14:33.313)
Nice, yeah.
Adam (14:38.117)
I was thinking about that too. So like when you come down to this like hardcover stats section and it says, know, 800,000 books read or whatever it is, it'll like jump up from zero to 800,000 with like, looks like it's climbing really fast to get there. Yeah.
Ste (14:48.758)
Yeah.
Ste (14:57.004)
huh. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Adam (15:02.852)
So yeah, we started last year with the top books that were read in 2023, the top 10. And then we had the most read books overall, which include books not from 2023. So this includes 2022 and other ones. I liked that combination. it kind of gave, it seems like there's two different stats there. One about,
One that lets you discover new books that came out that you might've missed and one just to see what's popular.
Ste (15:38.232)
Yeah.
Adam (15:40.876)
And then we did this, yeah. Then we did this monthly ones, all 12. And these were good. I think we could even include more than just the top five here, like the top, like, just so it like goes a little farther if we wanted to.
Ste (15:41.058)
Yeah, they're like complimentary. Yeah, monthly. Yeah, month by month. I like this one. Yeah.
Ste (15:59.03)
Yeah, yeah, we'll have to watch out. So for instance, look at this dragon here and the book is like love theoretically. So it's like a YA book and we have like, I think we did these images and some of the books, a few of them changed like.
Adam (16:05.54)
You
I think.
Ste (16:16.27)
right after we implemented the page. So the images got left and this one's actually pretty funny. Maybe it matches the vibe of the book. I don't know.
Adam (16:24.129)
Yeah, let me...
Adam (16:30.737)
Yeah, let me change this one because I know we have a different image because I remember seeing it.
Ste (16:37.566)
Okay, maybe we didn't, maybe it's cached or not replaced. But yeah, we'll have to see, that's why I was thinking maybe put an artist, real artist featured artist related to the theme over here. It's obviously not going to be the theme, but maybe we'll even...
find a way to do something else, maybe not do the images. I mean, that's like what I was thinking to avoid it or just update them with mid-journey. What's your thing? What do you think about still using mid-journey for?
for generation.
Adam (17:40.278)
Well, I guess it's like I, I personally don't have a problem with it, but I've like taking the cues from the community. I I'm leaning towards not including it just to, yeah, just to show our support for, for artists and, and that side. So, so maybe, maybe what we could do is like, if there are, communities for some of these books, maybe there's.
Ste (18:01.42)
Yeah.
Adam (18:10.212)
already some fan art that's been created and we can reach out to some creators who have already created some fan art and say like, Hey, I love that image you created. Could we use it in hardcover, your interview and, and, link it back to you.
Ste (18:26.124)
Yeah, that'd be like great actually. Like that would be the best case scenario. I'm wondering where we could find like the communities for all of these books because that's going to be like, I think the tricky part for some, mean, for you me and the Nightmare Painter or like for Brandon Sanderson in general, I think we're going to have no problem like finding the communities. But for some of the books.
Adam (18:51.116)
Yeah.
Yeah, for some of them, we could, we might be able to even like, there might be a whole bunch of different covers of the book. So we might be able to find like the most artistic cover and then get the best quality version of that one. And then like, take a screenshot of part of the image or something.
Ste (18:54.446)
It might be, yeah, might be tricky.
Ste (19:06.39)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (19:14.324)
Yeah, we can actually, I mean, this is like one possibility. We can like enhance the cover. So whatever they did with the cover, I think you can generate images based on the cover. So for instance, there's the cover and we can basically like zoom out so that it generates stuff around the cover, but tight to the cover.
Adam (19:23.076)
you
Ste (19:38.966)
I'd have to experiment a bit, but I think that would be looking pretty striking. So for instance, here you could just expand the cover so the cover looks like a small window from a bigger illustration. And that way it would basically be 100 % related to the cover. I have to experiment a bit. I'm not sure how that'd go, but maybe. Yeah.
Adam (19:44.778)
I see what you mean.
Adam (20:06.102)
Yeah, that would be fascinating. It would guarantee that all of these images look very related. But then again, it would be using, I guess it wouldn't necessarily be using mid-journey. That could be used like Photoshop, but it's some LLM, yeah.
Ste (20:16.044)
Yeah.
Ste (20:25.066)
Yeah, well, with Photoshop, it's significant. Well, Photoshop basically inserted AI features as well, and it can do that. So it can basically fill in any space in the photo. I'm actually going to try it with Photoshop. I mean, I know there are models, like from what we've researched, then they say at least that they didn't train them without...
Adam (20:34.861)
Yeah.
Adam (20:38.468)
.
Ste (20:54.282)
consent or you know, without you can opt out of training if you actually want. given that there were no laws that actually came to anything and you know, there are models that are pretty scrutinized from this point of view. I think, I mean, I'd be okay with like using a version for them, especially because, you know, we're showcasing the work of
authors and books that were popular on hardcover. you know, we're not even like, yeah.
Adam (21:29.25)
Yeah, I think I'd be more okay with that. I feel like the LLMs that are being created by people just crawling the web and downloading every image legally or not, I think those are the ones that I'm less excited to support than the ones that are opt-in with user data. Even though I don't love the idea of giving all my user data to a company to use, enough people have clicked the
Ste (21:43.7)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (21:48.172)
Yeah.
Adam (21:57.792)
accept the terms of service on that to make it still useful.
Ste (22:02.956)
Yeah, well, I think now it might even be for some of the newer model synthetic data. And of course, we really have to explain that because people don't know what we're using. They don't know that there are actually models which have these terms in place. So yeah, think this time around, just a little bit more communication around that.
Adam (22:20.228)
you
Ste (22:30.422)
will do the trick and still allow us to have these really nice layouts. I do love the images, so the images are really nice. They do have to be on point with the book though.
Adam (22:42.329)
Yeah.
Adam (22:48.376)
Yeah, like some of these ones, like you have to know quite a bit about the characters to make sure that, you know, this is in sync with the character of each book. Because every time we didn't, like for instance, in Tress in the Emerald Sea, like, you know, the water in Tress of the Emerald Sea is kind of a toxic, kind of thick, sludgy water. And if you go into it, you die.
Ste (23:00.823)
Yeah.
Adam (23:18.422)
And then one of our images generated, like she was at the shoreline and her feet were getting wet. And people like, she should be dead. And it's little things like that. Little things like that you wouldn't know unless you read the book.
Ste (23:23.726)
Okay, so that was the... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a very specific... Yeah.
Adam (23:35.672)
But I love how beautiful this is, like between this gradient and this color, like everything about this is just so pretty.
Ste (23:41.898)
Yeah, yeah, we should definitely like, maybe, let's see if it works to like, augment the cover somehow, because for this one, the cover is also like, giving like so much detail. I was thinking we could even like, make the cover bigger, especially like for the bigger books. And some people told us that they would actually like, prefer a bigger cover and just like, the gradients in the back.
Maybe I could play around with some shapes and some patterns as well, keeping the same structure. Basically, this is the same code we used last time, right, in terms of layouts. Okay, it's like, yeah, changing it would be fairly easy.
Adam (24:24.217)
Yeah.
Adam (24:32.686)
Yeah.
And let's see. Yeah, I know one of the things that we'll probably need to do is...
Adam (24:49.272)
like for these genres. One thing I realized last year is that, you know, we're only able to pull the top 10 fantasy books amongst books that have been tagged with fantasy in our system. And so like there were a lot of books that were read by a bunch of people last year, but then they weren't ever tagged with a genre. And so some of them weren't included in our year in books, at least not right away.
Ste (25:03.172)
Okay.
Adam (25:17.356)
Like an example was, I want to say like Starter Villain wasn't tagged with science fiction. So it didn't show up here until like one of the very, very last times I pulled it after I read Starter Villain and tagged it myself. So I'll probably want to create like just a list of the most popular books from 2024 that haven't been tagged so that either Jeff or the librarians can.
Ste (25:43.318)
Mmm, yeah.
Adam (25:46.09)
going and make sure they're tagged clearly.
Ste (25:48.97)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, maybe this week we can do a librarian call as well and put it in the channel with like the structure for this year's urine books and at least tell everyone to Yeah, keep on out for when we're gonna need help for instance when we're gonna have like the unpacked books that
are very popular so that they can label them. What do you think?
Adam (26:22.082)
I could probably programmatically create a list and add every book that was released in 2024 to that list. It'll be a big list, but we'll be able to add a column for genre, and then we'll be able to see which books are missing genre.
Ste (26:31.033)
Okay, nice.
Ste (26:39.66)
Yeah, that sounds good. And from that list, the librarians can come in, I'm guessing, and just fill in everything.
Adam (26:40.046)
And then, yeah.
Adam (26:46.041)
Yeah.
Ste (26:48.29)
Nice.
Adam (26:50.398)
Yeah. Cool.
Yeah, and like you said, we could create a doc with the format in the sections.
Adam (27:06.436)
And yeah, we can pretty much do something similar here. And I think the most answered prompts of this year will probably be like the ones, a lot of them that were created by readers that we promoted in our newsletter this time around instead of all being hardcover ones.
Ste (27:23.97)
Yeah, that's so nice to see. Finally!
Adam (27:25.676)
it
Adam (27:29.582)
Yes.
Ste (27:29.666)
Yeah, I saw some prompts like really like taking off.
Adam (27:37.175)
Yeah.
Ste (27:38.068)
Yeah, the trends will be like great places to get art for because I mean, we generated this these based on like the first book, but I think this can like just illustrate the trend. It doesn't have to be like about any of those books can just be like dark academia. And if we do this, we can like insert the link for the artist name on the actual.
Adam (28:07.907)
Yeah.
Adam (28:11.958)
Yeah, I'll be curious what ones we want to include. I feel like books to movies is kind of a generic enough one that we can do that every year. But I think all these other ones, I like a viral one, like whether that's viral on Book Talk or viral on any other platform. And yeah.
Ste (28:19.639)
Yeah.
Ste (28:34.422)
Yeah I think they're pretty good maybe we'll just change some of the ones that are like more or less popular series openers that's kind of a classic series finales yeah
Adam (28:41.878)
Yeah.
Adam (28:45.378)
Yeah, series finale is also. Yeah, I think. And then most anticipated of 2025, yeah, I think that'll be the same.
Ste (28:54.923)
Yeah.
Adam (28:58.624)
Yeah. Are there any other sections that jump to mind for you that are like, man, I wish we had.
done something else.
Ste (29:10.424)
Yeah, good question. Well, I know last year were pretty thorough, so apart from the stats, maybe something about the readers, but I'm not...
or like I was thinking the most liked something, the most, well, maybe the most liked review.
Ste (29:43.966)
and have like a top, I don't know, 20 reviews or what else can we do? The person that generated the most book referrals maybe if we want to like have that, although I'm not sure this is more about books. Maybe it's not about users. I don't know.
Adam (30:07.756)
Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe including individual user celebrations might be a little out of place. But what about most popular series where it's not just the most popular book that was read, but if you include all the books in a series and each time someone reads any of the books in the series, that's a vote for that series?
Ste (30:18.86)
Yeah, that's true. Let's do like, yeah.
Ste (30:37.748)
yeah, so an aggregated score of all the reads for that series. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do that. Maybe most popular comic as well, because that's like not just a comic, like the whole like the whole comic. Yeah.
Adam (30:37.838)
And then.
Adam (30:41.869)
Yeah.
Adam (30:48.49)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (30:53.09)
Yeah, it's a genre. Yeah, we could, if we wanted to do that, we could also do by any other format. Like we have, like I'm trying to remember what our options are. There's like, know, light novel, manga, graphic novel.
Ste (31:14.667)
Yeah, graphic novel could be... yeah, graphic novel wouldn't be too bad. I'm betting there's like some killer covers for graphic novels, so we can just like make one of those like real big.
Adam (31:28.489)
Yeah, yeah, we could, once we pull the data on those, we'll be able to see if like, light novel even deserves have one like if the reader, if there are enough readers to make it be interesting data.
Ste (31:39.32)
Yeah.
Ste (31:43.924)
Yeah, yeah, the more niche things, I mean, I do buy maybe most successful poetry that might lead to some interesting discoveries. That's like the genre. So, yeah, not the format. But yeah, some of the more niche one like light novel. Maybe leave out, but manga, comics, graphic novels.
I think those definitely would be like very nice to see.
Adam (32:15.33)
Yeah, I think one of the tricky parts might be like scoping it to 2024. We could, there's two ways of doing it. We could skip the like the most read like individual issue of 2024 or we just like look at what people read in 2024 and then we find what series the graphic novels were part of.
which I think is what makes sense. it's like, this is the graphic novel series that the most people have read individual issues from in 2024.
Ste (32:44.379)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the series definitely. Yeah
Ste (32:55.264)
yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, not the single issue. That might be a bit weird, but actually we can show it like series, but we can have like one for series like in general and one for comics, which are actually like the series of comics. So, you know, you get like Spy Family or something else.
Adam (32:57.858)
Yeah.
Adam (33:11.161)
Right.
Right, so it's kind of, yeah, it's kind of yeah, it's kind of like using the series option, but using it series for books, series for comics, or for graphic novels, yeah. Cool. That makes sense.
Ste (33:21.516)
Yeah. Yeah.
Adam (33:29.378)
Well, let's see.
What else would be really neat?
Ste (34:02.592)
Is there like a genre we missed that became more popular in the meantime? I don't think so. I think last time we like scoped all the most popular ones, right?
Adam (34:19.756)
Yeah, I think.
Adam (34:25.398)
Yeah, there's probably some in here we didn't get like, some of these are like kind of hard to place like adventure is less descriptive a genre.
Ste (34:37.006)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it might be like...
sci-fi or fantasy as well, more like in that section.
Adam (34:43.278)
Yeah.
Adam (34:47.416)
I can see mystery or thriller. Like, I see that as a genre that's like really popular but not on here. Yeah.
Ste (34:59.294)
Yeah, mystery. Mystery. Yeah, mystery could be like something we didn't include and could have included.
Adam (35:10.828)
Yeah, nonfiction covers a lot. We did biography.
So I think we did biography, yeah. no, we didn't do that as a genre. We did biography as part of community trends for heartfelt memoirs. So some things can be in trends, some things can be in genres, depending on where we want them.
Ste (35:31.67)
yeah, Hardshell Memoirs, yeah.
Ste (35:39.274)
Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, it's more like fuzzy and heartfelt memoirs and sounds way better than biography.
Adam (35:49.273)
Yeah.
But yeah, I think.
Adam (35:57.708)
Yeah, thriller.
Adam (36:02.82)
think we're covered, covered most of them.
Ste (36:07.188)
Yeah, think, yeah, general wise, it's pretty solid.
Adam (36:13.336)
Should we do some- we could do something with moods. We didn't really do anything with moods last year.
Ste (36:17.9)
Hmm yeah that's true. What are like the top moods? Adventurous, emotional, dark, mysterious, light-hearted, challenging. Interesting. Yeah there's like a whole lot of moods that seem interesting but...
Adam (36:40.355)
Yeah.
Ste (36:40.544)
Wow, this seems like mostly the classics. Now here we go, book release date,
Adam (36:45.176)
Yeah.
Adam (36:49.028)
There's still a bunch of 2024 ones with this tag.
Ste (36:53.358)
Hmm.
Adam (36:58.536)
We could, I mean, if we did that, it could be pretty much the same as these genre ones.
Ste (37:07.148)
Yeah, they could be like exactly like the general ones. Let's try to include some some moods. Maybe we can like, would it be worth like treating them at the same level as genres? Or maybe we can find like a layout that's more like more moods in one so that's, you know, they're, I'm thinking something like trends, but for moods. So it's not like that, you know.
Adam (37:36.74)
Yeah, because.
Ste (37:38.136)
that complex.
Adam (37:40.054)
Yeah, like we could do, if we wanted to do this, we could do like mood and then mood here. Cause I think like we could show the most red thing in a given mood, but that doesn't mean it has the most of that mood. It might not be the moodiest of that mood. So yeah, the order, where the order matters a lot less than just kind of showing them all next to each other.
Ste (37:46.796)
Yeah.
Ste (38:00.844)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
Ste (38:11.168)
Yeah, that's actually true. I wasn't thinking about that, but now that you say it, the ranking doesn't make less sense. But yeah, I think we should include mods. And maybe we can.
like have the top five modes or just do a selection of the most like
Ste (38:40.046)
it's a most likely to be picked or be relevant, like dark, lighthearted, yeah.
Adam (38:51.672)
Maybe funny and adventurous. Yeah, maybe we can just pick like three that kind of encapsulate a wide variety of moods.
Ste (39:03.68)
Yeah, that sounds good. Let's just put them there and we'll see what books end up inside those like moon boxes.
Adam (39:16.471)
Yeah.
Adam (39:20.578)
Let's see. So that's, I think that's probably a good amount of additions. I mean, series and moods are kind of, series, moods and the overall hardcover stats plus everything we kind of did last year. I think that's a solid, a solid, yeah, a solid approach.
Ste (39:45.46)
Yeah, I think so too. It was pretty long last year as well. I might change this cover so that right now it kind of shows a combination of what the books that are included and we tried to generate scenes from those books. yeah.
For this one, I'd maybe completely change it so that it's something else. Maybe I can even make it nice, huge jewels illustrations because we have some of those. And just use that so it's original artwork. And then just jump into the sections. So yeah, think I, how do you feel about that changing like this?
Adam (40:14.98)
Thanks
Ste (40:34.848)
Intro one.
Adam (40:36.6)
Yeah, yeah, I'm done for that. I did like, I did really like this one, but I know like getting this much artwork without AI art is gonna be tough.
Ste (40:49.684)
Yeah, I mean, we could do it. could, yeah, I'm going to think about it. You know, we could generate some, something that's like really, really nice. Maybe something that's more integrated here. It kind of looks like there's like a bunch of stuff just put together. Maybe we can have one, which is a bit more tied together. This one looks nice. So we can just like revamp the message.
so that it's more current to what we're currently doing. yeah, also I think it's just a matter of getting the content and trying to, yeah, let's see if we can get some artwork. I really love that for some books at least. I'm sure they're hardcore fans of.
Adam (41:17.827)
Yeah.
Ste (41:41.494)
some of the books and if they agree to share their artwork and for us to credit it, that'd be like really neat.
Adam (41:52.194)
Yeah.
Adam (41:56.032)
Right now, the way that this is configured is, let me share my screen. It's pretty impressively easy to change this. So let's see. Share my.
Screen here.
Ste (42:21.126)
definitely like a result of us and mainly you like trying to organize it last year I guess because I know once we got the like layout in place it was like very easy to do new sections and change everything
Adam (42:29.038)
Let me see, does that work?
Adam (42:40.362)
Yeah, looks like it's not letting me share right now. Are you able to see my screen?
Ste (42:48.508)
no, not yet. Wait.
Adam (42:50.82)
Let me try this again here.
Ste (42:55.83)
It's not showing the code.
Adam (43:01.301)
maybe this.
Let's see.
It says Riverside is sharing a window, but then it... I don't think I saw it sharing.
Ste (43:16.722)
Nope, not yet. Not sharing yet.
Adam (43:19.396)
Okay, I think this might not want to share today. At least it shared earlier. That was the important part.
Ste (43:27.246)
That was the important part. I mean, you were gonna show the code, right?
Adam (43:33.282)
Yeah. Yeah. But it's basically just a configuration file where we just list a bunch of book IDs and then have some, it's like a serializer that will serialize everything that the page needs. And then on that page, we just reuse the same components over and over again. like, you know, the month one,
all it does is take in an array of books and some configuration options, which we'll still probably do pretty much the same as last time where we we hard code all of things like the color gradients, the titles and all that. yeah, I think, I think, I think since like the entire content that's being generated is gonna be cached.
Like as soon as one person loads the page, then it'll like work like that for everyone else.
Ste (44:35.562)
Nice, yeah caching always surprises me. thought it was like I load the page and it's gonna show me the whole thing but it's like any person knows the page and it shows like everyone.
Adam (44:48.142)
Yeah, yeah, everything will be.
Ste (44:50.348)
So that's like server side cache or so basically like the server does that like on the first, it's not like WordPress caching or something like that.
Adam (45:01.29)
Right, so it'll generate kind of this big JSON object of every book that's being shown on the page. It'll have a section for the top books, the section for the most read, top authors, all that. And that's a really big JSON object. And that'll be stuffed into like, right now it's, it would be in Redis cache, but by the time we deploy this, it'll probably be in a Postgres cache. that, but it's basically the same thing. It's just.
shoving a big JSON object in and then reading it out when someone accesses it.
Ste (45:35.316)
Nice. Yeah, I was listening to the podcast you shared where DHH was speaking about Rails and I was reading the Rails announcement and I don't understand the actual technicalities of it, but it sounds like there's a lot been done to simplify stuff that's been messing up the React and the Next.js experience and generally the client sides.
of doing things and the deployment, like stuff like Kamal and what they were talking about with like server configuration. That's like very good to hear about because it seems like everything's like locked into some companies right now. And it would be like very refreshing to be able to do that in a sort of like...
not hacky way, like an official way by yourself, like with your own server and...
Adam (46:37.024)
Yeah, yeah, getting off of Next.js will definitely increase our options for where we host the site. Like, Next.js hosting is significantly more complicated than Rails hosting. like Rails hosting, just like, it's pretty much like a process that runs and it listens on a port and it...
accepts, does input and then returns some HTML. While Next.js is more like designed to be serverless. So each individual endpoint can be deployed as its own endpoint. So like when you deploy on something like for cell or on cloud, CloudFlare, it's taking each of those endpoints and spinning them up separately, which is why it ends up costing more to run it.
Ste (47:16.376)
Yeah.
Adam (47:35.084)
it's because you're not running just one app in memory, you're running like one app for every endpoint. And I think like we listed out all the endpoints as part of this Rails conversion. And we have something like 128 like endpoints in the app, because each URL is an endpoint. So it's like, it's 128 like Lambda functions that are running and returning stuff. yeah, going down to Rails will significantly...
Ste (47:50.414)
Okay. Yeah.
Adam (48:04.482)
reduce the hosting costs, which will be nice.
Ste (48:07.999)
Yeah, Rail seems like in that meme where, you know, there's a gym, there's someone doing like a backflip and it's like super simple and someone doing gymnastics, jumping through groups of fire and just standing up in the same like point. So like the above seems like Rail's the next seems like doing all those like gymnastics to get to the same point. And I think that's why the HH is also like so adamant about
Adam (48:19.204)
You
Ste (48:36.598)
you know, keeping the Rails experience, I guess.
clean in that way, not like over-complicating it.
Adam (48:47.192)
Yeah. Yeah. It, it helps that I think like one of the, kind of difficulties that next JS runs into is that, you know, they're, they're kind of run by like verse, Vercell and next JS are very tightly linked. They're tightly coupled and Vercell makes their money by selling hosting. And so it's, it's not exactly in their best interest to make hosting cheaper or free.
or easy. So it's less of a priority. I mean, I'm sure they want to do that because like Next.js is an open source project, like all of people working on it love open source. But at a high level from from Vercell down, it's less of a priority than something like Rails where Rails is an open source project where the owners are using like, you know, they are deploying Rails to the cheapest hardware they can find. So they have
Ste (49:27.33)
Yeah.
Ste (49:45.731)
Yeah.
Adam (49:46.689)
they have a motivation to keep it easy to deploy. yeah, it's easy to see how those motivations impact what the final product becomes.
Ste (49:56.692)
Yeah, yeah, definitely like different incentives and yeah, it's a different approach. But it seems to like, yeah, it sounds great. And I can wait to be done with like the migration and be able to, you know, focus on shipping, shipping the features because we got lots of those in the pipeline as everybody knows. Yeah.
Adam (50:19.459)
you
Ste (50:23.094)
Nice. So I'm guessing, you know, the even books, it's a pretty good place to start gathering content at this point.
Adam (50:35.042)
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think it sounds like the next step will be create that doc and share it with the librarians of the different sections. And then we can start getting ideas for the community, community trend section. And yeah.
Ste (50:45.367)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (50:53.922)
Yeah.
And I can do like, how should, how is it easier if I jump into the code or if I just like design the platform stats, for instance, the hard cover stats, should I just like jump in a new brand on a new branch and.
see what you've been working on or should I just design them and then we can talk about the meet rate there a bit and then maybe jump into code when it's in a better place.
Adam (51:33.56)
I could probably come up with like a really basic version of the 2024 urine books, like just copying the 2023 one and then using that as a starting point. And then maybe we can just like start there and then you'd be able to add new pages to that like flow. And you could add the stats ones with like hard coded stats to it.
Ste (51:55.67)
Nice. Yeah. Yeah, we can do that. I think it's going to be like easier and it's really like getting easier for me to actually like code the thing directly than it is to actually design it. I haven't been like for code stuff. I've been reluctant to go in Figma because it's actually slower. I didn't think like I'd ever say that, but yeah.
It's actually like ways here to, instance, if I want to grid with columns, it's easier to like, just like loop it up in Tailwind and just do it there instead of moving stuff around in Figma and just like making it responsive, like on the spot. It's, yeah, it's different once you have the whole setup and it's good that, you know, now.
Adam (52:40.721)
Nice.
Ste (52:47.488)
It's all like laid in place. So yeah, that sounds good. I'll start hard coding them once you duplicate the page. And yeah, we can get going with those. So maybe after you're done with the migration, we can have this. And maybe we can focus on the new stats.
Adam (53:13.56)
Yeah, I think what I'm thinking is that for the stats, we can probably release them with the new inertia page. Like maybe we don't do the dashboard yet, but at least the stats can be in there. That way we don't have to migrate over the current stats and then upgrade them. We can just migrate the upgraded version.
Ste (53:29.411)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (53:39.284)
Yeah, that'd be great and a very, very exciting prospect for everyone on hardcover.
Adam (53:46.626)
Yeah, I'm thinking about as part of the migration for now, removing list stats. Like we would still have the stat for like how many books you've read in a list, but we currently have that other page, which was like one of the very first pages created on hardcover. And it's pretty hidden. think we can talk about when we want to revisit that to redo that stats page. But I think for now.
Ste (53:54.562)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ste (54:00.087)
Yeah.
Ste (54:05.729)
Yeah.
Ste (54:15.18)
Mm-hmm
Adam (54:16.096)
That page isn't as used as I initially had hoped it would be. So I'm good kind of just discontinuing it and revisiting it later.
Ste (54:25.002)
Yeah, that sounds great actually. And for the stats, there might be some that are more complicated. I think we can just hard code them, have them in a coming soon mode so people can see that they will be there just so that we can ship this faster. I'm imagining some where it might get a bit tricky.
Adam (54:39.492)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (54:52.526)
If it gets too tricky, we can prioritize shipping the ones that are more feasible and then having the ones that are hard coded because they're like, basically the UI is done and they'll still get people excited.
It's nice to get feedback as well. The three stats I added, publishers by country, I made like a nice world map. The publishers by year and the series data, those were suggested by people on Discord. So I'm guessing there will be like...
Lots of feedback once we launch it. The upside now is that we can iterate way easier on the actual stats because the implementation is custom. We don't rely on libraries. It's like, yeah, way easier to.
Adam (55:41.124)
You
Yeah.
Adam (55:50.84)
Yeah, I'm excited about how easy it's going to be to do those kinds of updates now without having to create API endpoints for every little thing we do.
Ste (55:59.19)
Yeah.
Ste (56:03.854)
Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Well, it opens up like this work. It opens up a full year of like speeding up the updates. And I think, you know, we're going to reach 20k readers soon. So like, thank you everybody for like signing up. It's been like a wild year. We've like grown like four times. We're like 5,000. Like we had 5,000 readers at the beginning of the year.
and we'll probably like end up with over 20,000 once we have the stats and the like even books out. Maybe we can put that as a figure in there as well.
Adam (56:33.731)
Yep.
Adam (56:41.102)
Yeah.
Adam (56:49.538)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy to think we've had like 400 % growth this year and it still feels like we're still just getting started.
Ste (56:51.096)
could be nice.
Ste (56:57.941)
Yeah.
Ste (57:01.998)
Yeah, exactly. mean, yeah, I'm hoping it's going to be the same next year because if it's going to be like that, it's going to become a way more serious project. It is already a serious project and I'm glad it's almost covering costs. So I think we're like nine people away from covering the server costs, right, or around that.
So like 10 people more and it will be sustaining. So the next step will be for Hardcover to sustain us working on it full time, I guess, which is very, very exciting to have that milestone as the next milestone.
Adam (57:29.337)
Yeah.
Adam (57:47.614)
Yeah, that would be the dream.
Ste (57:50.018)
Who knows, maybe last next year. Yeah, by this time that could be happening.
Adam (57:55.747)
Yeah.
Cool, well, with that, yeah, thanks for jumping on and chatting and thanks everyone for listening. And yeah, I think it's a good place to call it for the day. See you, have a good one.
Ste (58:00.32)
Yeah.
Ste (58:12.62)
Yeah, sounds great. Well, see you everyone next week.
Bye bye.