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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 (00:01.378)
Hey, hey, stay. How's it going?
Ste (00:04.79)
Aya, going pretty well, how's it going on the Aero Yarn?
Adam (00:08.562)
It is like dumping snow right now. Like we had like a winter storm advisory. And so like we've had like 30, 40 inches of snow this week. And yeah, right now, yeah, it's not very safe to drive right now. So I'm happy to be at home.
Ste (00:29.314)
Oh wow. Okay, yeah, that sounds pretty massive. I mean, 30 inches of snow, that's a lot.
Adam (00:36.694)
Yeah. Especially since, um, tomorrow the Sundance film festival starts. So tons of people are in town right now for it. And, uh, I have a feeling park city where like most of the Sundance film festival is, is even like more crazy since they're at a higher elevation than us. And so they get even more snow. So it's gotta be like chaos there.
Ste (00:59.866)
Yeah, that sounds pretty harsh. Is it normal, you know, this amount of snow? Or is it, I've seen there's like a cold wave. I've seen Chicago look like something for the day after tomorrow, like really like apocalyptic scenes.
Adam (01:16.818)
Yeah, I think it's mostly that. It's just this one storm happened to come through on a busy week.
Ste (01:25.77)
Okay, gotcha. Are they giving away those little like You know tennis rackets to walk on the snow. I know what they're called exactly, but I imagine those could be useful Yes, no shoes. Okay. Yeah, there's no shoes make sense. Yeah
Adam (01:26.379)
Yeah.
Adam (01:35.848)
Yeah, snowshoes.
Adam (01:40.85)
Yeah, I mean, you can get those at Costco here. Like they, they have them like very easily accessible for like 70 bucks, but I think you'd only use those when like hiking.
Ste (01:49.593)
Oh wow.
Okay, okay, so it's not a snowshoe situation right now.
Adam (01:56.566)
No, more just like get your hearty winter boots out that you can trek through the snow with and you'll be fine.
Ste (02:03.59)
Okay, that sounds good. Are they usually good with like getting rid of the snow on the pavements, on the sidewalks and on the street?
Adam (02:12.37)
On the street. Yes, definitely on the sidewalk. It really depends on the business or the, the owner of the, the place. Like, I think you're supposed to like shovel your snow so that everyone, um, cause I think you're like responsible if someone hurts themselves on your strip of sidewalk. Um, but like when it's currently snowing, I think you have an excuse not to go out and shovel. You have to wait until it ends.
Ste (02:28.018)
Okay.
Ste (02:36.704)
Haha, okay. Yeah.
Adam (02:38.219)
So if it's gonna snow for a week straight, then it might just pile up for a bit.
Ste (02:43.126)
Yeah, well that makes sense. Don't have that problem in London definitely. It's been really cold. It's been cold as hell for like London but yeah none of that. I've seen like literally like three snowflakes in January so yeah that was it. Kind of miss the snow though yeah.
Adam (02:47.272)
the
Adam (03:05.302)
Does it get colder in London or Romania?
Ste (03:09.442)
Oh, Romania definitely. Romania is like minus 20 degrees Celsius in winter and 40 in summer. So that's... yeah, a lot.
Adam (03:19.862)
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty hot. Yeah.
Ste (03:22.054)
It's hard. So I'm used to like that kind of extreme climate. I've actually, I mean, I appreciate Dandam because it's a bit more tame. It's not like going to those, yeah, really like insufferable extremes. But yeah, it's been pretty cold. And, you know, after a week, it's kind of like, well, I mean, you know all about it. I'm assuming, you know, you get used to it.
Way faster.
Adam (03:54.081)
Yeah, aside from that, what have you been up to lately? So far in this year.
Ste (03:58.366)
Well, not much has been called, so yeah, just I have a really nice coffee shop near me. They opened like it's a former watch house. It's actually called Watch House. So it's in a churchyard and I think they make watches there, I guess, and like it's a really small cafe and they have really good coffee and hot chocolate. So we've been going with the baby on walks there,
Seven minutes away, I guess. Grabbing a hot chocolate, going around the churchyard park, doing some shopping, coming back home. So that's been the January routine, which I can't complain. I'm liking, I mean, as long as you have a hot chocolate, you know, walks in the park are pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, how about you?
Adam (04:50.99)
Yeah, that sounds very nice. Are there a lot of people out?
Ste (04:56.394)
Yeah, yeah, it's a really busy street, the one they're on. It's one of the, I think, most thriving in South London. It's Bermondsey Street, and they're just at the end of it. And from that coffee shop, they actually like, they're a big chain in London now. They've gotten like eight million dollars investment, and they're like everywhere in London right now. So yeah, pretty good business, and they have really good coffee.
Adam (05:26.93)
That sounds very nice. Good way to get outside the apartment for a while, get some sun, get a walk in.
Ste (05:35.35)
Oh yeah, definitely. And with the murder last week, I mean, I don't know if, uh, yeah, I've, you know, I haven't spoken on live about it, but yeah, there was a murder literally in the building next to me and yeah, I woke up last week, there was a body cover body, thank God outside my window with police standing around them. I mean, yeah.
Adam (05:41.872)
I'm sorry.
Ste (05:58.638)
Rest in peace whoever that was but yeah, it's been so police barricaded there yeah, and for a couple of days they had to like walk you out and Yeah, I've seen like it was like literally like in a British crime scene series exactly like that
Adam (06:01.026)
Wow.
Ste (06:16.782)
I was amazed it was happening just like outside. Then they put everything, I think they're still, right now they have police patrolling the area still after, but yeah, that was interesting a bit. I mean, yeah, maybe scary, but yeah, I think more interesting than scary.
Adam (06:38.314)
Man, yeah, that's very close by.
Ste (06:40.145)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a relatively safe area even. I mean, I'm not even in the bad part. I'm far from the bad part and the bad part is still pretty good. I mean, I don't have any like trouble walking there, but yeah, I guess it happens, you know, big city.
Ste (07:04.994)
Yeah, that's been interesting.
Adam (07:08.792)
Yeah, that's a lot of stuff going on locally for you.
Ste (07:12.862)
Uh huh, yeah exactly. Got me in the mood for some like crime drama to be honest. I've been watching Fargo so that's been... the last season has been great. Have you been watching it?
Adam (07:18.706)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (07:23.22)
Yeah, I've.
Adam (07:28.67)
We, uh, we binged it over the last week. So we are up to date. So we're, we're ready for the finale, which I guess came out last night. So we will probably watch it today.
Ste (07:37.19)
Oh really? Okay, I did. Oh nice. Okay. Yeah. It's really, yeah, I know. I mean, they never miss. They never miss. It's I think one of my favorites. If not my favorite series, they always, I mean, it's the same thing. It's Minnesota, it's snow. Yeah. I love the snowy, you know, atmosphere there. Have you ever been to Minnesota?
Adam (07:43.449)
Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to see where this goes.
Adam (08:03.87)
No, I've been to 40 states and 40, like 43 states in the U S. So it's one of my goals to get to 50 states by the time I'm 50. And so, uh, like most of the states they haven't been to are Alaska, Hawaii, and like all those states right around Minnesota, like Dakota's Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nebraska, like, so we want to do a Midwest trip sometime and, and go there.
Ste (08:15.102)
Nice.
Ste (08:32.534)
Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, I'd love to go there as well, just based off, you know, the scenes I've seen in Fargo. Looks exciting. OK, during the summer. That's a good tip. Yeah. Yeah, well, maybe. Yeah.
Adam (08:42.372)
Maybe during the summer.
Adam (08:47.626)
Yeah, or at least maybe like spring actually, because I think in the summer it also gets really hot.
Ste (08:54.134)
Okay. Yeah, that's a good tip. I'm just going to wait for you to do the Midwest strip. And yeah, you can tell me how it was. Perfect. And for hardcover, we had Jeff last week on the live.
Adam (09:08.958)
Yep. And since then we've kind of deployed a couple of things. Let's see. I wrote some notes cause like I've been trying to like do like a change log on hardcover. Um, so since last week we, um, added the ability to add additions to existing books if you're logged in. So if like there's an addition missing, you can just add it. Um,
It doesn't have to have an ISBN, but it's nice if it does. Ability to add new books manually. So you don't have to have a book, like we had an ad by ISBN and an ad by Goodreads ID. Now you can like just manually enter a book. And behind the scenes, we have this concept that Jeff recommended, which is like, we have this user added tag, which is applied to books that are added by readers, and then librarians can remove that.
And once it's removed, that book will show up in search and it'll be kind of public. But this way it kind of guarantees that newly added books aren't basically an attack vector for getting bad stuff into the system. So we wanted to make sure that was had a process for it. Yeah, and then we added progress by page number, a date picker for dates read and a.
ability to buy books. It was like lots of little changes that we've been meaning to do for a while.
Ste (10:42.122)
Yeah, that's a lot of stuff going on. And so now if you're a librarian, you can actually add any books. So this is for custom books or books that you can't get in the system for the importer, right?
Adam (10:59.006)
Yeah. I'll share my screen real quick for some of these. Um, let's see.
Ste (11:04.719)
Oh yeah.
Ste (11:08.018)
That's great. Yeah, this is a huge update. I mean, all of the things are pretty huge, including the...
ability to see where you can buy the book. That's been really, really nice to see, to see implemented. I saw that you also added the subtitle under Amazon, Corporate Behemoth. That's... I was actually surprised to see that live, but yay!
Adam (11:32.934)
Yeah.
Adam (11:38.743)
I saw that in your mock-up and I'm like, I think I gotta go with this. Yeah, so what I'm talking about is this thing. Yeah.
Ste (11:42.914)
Yeah. I mean, well, they are. So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Here we go. At least, you know, buy from Amazon, but know who they are. And I guess know our stance on. Yeah, fun, little fun little Easter egg.
Adam (11:54.018)
Yeah.
Adam (11:59.814)
Yeah. And one thing that was kind of neat was, uh, this becomes a book drawer on like mobile sites once you're like in a, a little screen, it switches to that. And then if you are big, it becomes kind of just a drop down.
Ste (12:15.746)
Yeah, yeah, this is great. And in the future when we also maybe be able to add books from independent booksellers and maybe even like sync those to the location of where you are, yeah, that's going to be an even more comprehensive list. But yeah, that's...
Adam (12:35.714)
Yeah, this feels like one of those features that like, oh, let's just link to a couple of stores. It's gonna be easy. But then you realize like all the other edge cases, like, you know, we have dozens of ISBNs for a book. Like, you know, there are 21 editions of this. Which edition do we link to? And then after that, it's like, if that store doesn't have that specific edition, then you might get a not found error once you get to the store. So,
I have a feeling we're gonna need to like actually hit some APIs to understand like which links, because I have a feeling if I go to buy book, yeah, I mean, there's like a, like that's happened for a lot of ones I've looked at 404s because we're linking to an ISBN that, um, I guess we should be linking to a different one.
Ste (13:15.943)
Yeah.
Ste (13:27.01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's I mean on the buying and That's very complex, but at least now we have the functionality. So Yeah, at least we can without the edge cases in time
Adam (13:42.294)
Yeah. The other thing he added was a, it's like date picker for setting the dates that you read a book and actually let me, uh, let me pull this up locally. So I'm not like messing up my personal, um, dates read for anything.
Ste (14:00.018)
Hehehehe
Adam (14:02.906)
Yeah, you can. Oh, wait. Yeah. Yeah, you can. Oh, I think I'm on your branch and it doesn't have those. Yeah. But here, yeah.
Ste (14:04.259)
Here we go.
Ste (14:11.639)
Oh yeah, it wasn't implemented yet.
Yeah, I think it's clear from the demo. Yeah, you can actually, it's a really nice, okay, if it was an audio book or, yeah.
Adam (14:21.238)
And you can toggle your.
Yeah, by clicking here.
Adam (14:31.566)
Yeah. And I think the other thing we added this week was update progress and you can do it by percent or by page number. And page number defaults to the page, the account that we think that book is, but there are so many different additions that like your page number might vary. So you could, like if your book has 300 pages, you could change that.
Ste (14:32.046)
Nice. Yeah.
Adam (15:01.418)
And then if you were to like leave it and come back to it, it's gonna use the page number that you set.
Ste (15:07.722)
Okay, that's nice. Yeah, that's a good solution for actually, yeah, making sure that it matches your edition because with the books that have 100 editions, it's tough for us to get the page numbers. Even if we have the edition, we might not have the page number for that edition because the way it's imported or the way it's...
Ste (15:36.326)
Yeah, in our system. So yeah, that helps. I'm guessing in the future when you'd be able to choose the edition you're having, I'm guessing it would be nice to, if that edition has a page count, to apply that page count, but yeah, that's.
Adam (15:58.698)
Yeah, yeah, that's what it's doing. Like if you've selected an addition, it'll use that addition's page count. If you haven't selected an addition, it'll use kind of the default addition.
Ste (16:06.506)
Okay, so it's...
Ste (16:12.962)
Nice, okay, that's wow, okay. That's really neat. So it does that already. Here we go.
Adam (16:19.138)
Yep. And yeah. And then here is the, had a book to hard cover. Um, one added book without ISBN, add it manually. And then it's basically just like the same as the edit edition form where you can add a, a book and then we'll redirect, we'll create the edition and we'll create the book and we'll redirect you to that book page. So you could very quickly go from this page to.
marking it as want to read in like that's the next step or whatever.
Ste (16:53.83)
Yeah, I think this is one of the easiest flows I've seen around. I mean, for some books, and there are some books which don't appear not even on imports, so they're hard to... Yeah, this is going to be a really good option for people who are reading those books. We're getting, I think, right now...
Every couple of days someone is signing up and going straight to wanting the ability to edit the books they're reading, which is a great sign for us. But also this like, I think this completes the whole like, librarian capability, um, span of features. So yeah, really good news.
Adam (17:42.394)
Yeah, these were some of those features that I've been wanting to get in for a while and like one of the tricky parts was that these were initially designed with this idea that we would always have some external data about a book to kind of create it. Like we were getting the book from Open Library or from Goodreads or from Google Books and we were using that as kind of that seed
Adam (18:11.458)
kind of switching it up to using whatever the user enters as that seed for creating it, which was, it took some trial and error to figure out how to get it right, but I think we're in a good spot for it now.
Ste (18:25.354)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. What were the toughest things you think that were like your main concern when building this?
Adam (18:37.15)
It's mostly that like when we look at a book on hardcover and we, so like this is the edit book page and all of this is like generated based on the data we have. Like most of this hasn't been entered by a human. It's all kind of coming from the addition.
like whatever we consider like the default edition for the book. So we don't need someone to go in and enter all this data. We just need someone to like link it to its goodreads or its Google info. And then we'll like be able to fetch the info from Google. And then we'll use that for the cover, for the page type, page count, like release date. So you don't have to enter all this manually.
but we can override it. And then we have this idea of like, you can hard reset a field and it'll switch it from user enter data to data we have on file from external services. So, having a way for people to enter it manually, but still have a way to default to data from Google Books if it's available was kind of the hard part. But I think we've...
found kind of a good balance where it's like you can override any fields, but you don't have to.
Ste (20:10.75)
Okay. Yeah, that sounds great. So in the event that someone would add a book and there would already be info about that book on Google Books right now, we could be fetching that info as well as having the user, the data from the reader who actually edits it, right?
Adam (20:34.174)
Exactly. Yeah.
Ste (20:36.45)
Yeah, well, that's all options covered. Yeah, I imagine that was like really like technical, a hard technical fit to achieve.
Adam (20:48.146)
It took some design over the last two years, but it feels like it's finally like the ideas we had two years ago are kind of paying off now with this flow. So yeah.
Ste (20:58.862)
Yeah, yeah, Bukdeita is like such a, I mean, it's never ending. And yeah, it seems like every time we, you know, reach like a plateau, you know, there's like a whole lot of the journey like ahead. But this, yeah, the design looks very...
Adam (21:15.669)
Yeah.
Ste (21:21.546)
clean and make sense now. What do you think about the book data on other platforms? Is it, I mean, I'm guessing, you know, lots of the stuff that you've been trying to avoid are things that some of the other platforms didn't avoid. I mean, even Goodreads has a lot of messy data about books. And yeah, I've seen it on every other platform.
Adam (21:47.262)
Yeah, I think.
Ste (21:51.658)
where they don't like curate it, but they only curate it for like the popular titles. If you get down to like more niche books, yeah, you can see they either don't have them or they don't have like the info.
Adam (22:09.502)
Yeah, I think one of the hardest things for us and one that we're still kind of figuring out how to handle, it's like, so we have like this book, Hyperion, and we know of 21 editions about this book. And there are probably many, many more editions in tons of different languages, tons of different formats that aren't included in this 21. And so over time,
those additions are going to be added to our database in some way. Sometimes as a new addition to this book, but sometimes as a new addition to a new book. And so we have to merge that new book into this book. That way the addition gets added here instead of having it as two separate entire books. And I feel like that's kind of one of the things that we're doing that's been a little different than some of the other sites.
Like even Goodreads, like if you go to Hyperion, there's a book page for Hyperion and every edition has its own page for Hyperion or for any book. We're kind of going with the stance that this book is the same regardless of which, it's still Hyperion regardless of which language you read it in, what format you read it in. The specific edition you read is still going to provide additional information like, you know.
We could have a rating per edition, which we might have someday. But for now, it seems like, since we're focusing on English, it's pretty unexpected error there. It's pretty similar in its context. But yeah, once we start getting into other languages, we might have like, do some other stuff there. But yeah, that kind of difference between editions and books in our system.
Ste (23:51.498)
Yeah.
Adam (24:06.846)
I feel like that's one of the design decisions we made at an early state, which I feel like it helps like, um, kind of bring together all the fans of a, of a single book under a single page, rather than having them dispersed across the platform on multiple additions.
Ste (24:25.562)
Yeah, that's vital. I mean, that seems like the way to go when you're dealing with the book. I mean, if you read Hyperion in Spanish or if you read it in English, it's the same book. And even with the rating, you're kind of rating the same book. Maybe you're like, maybe it would be a separate rating for the translation, but it wouldn't be like a separate book.
if you read it in English, Spanish, or whatever other language. So yeah, this feels very, very right. And yeah, I think is the reason why overall the data, even if, you know, we're gathering it, uh, and we haven't been gathering it for such a long time for like the span of time we've been gathering it and for the time we had the librarian, uh, program, uh, active, I think it's in pretty good shape.
Yeah, the saying that rating per edition can be critical for translations. Definitely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it could be like a decision, like a granular decision. Maybe you like the book, but you don't like the translation. It, there's like no way on any book site to show that preference right now. So we might go down that route, but yeah, I guess TBD.
Adam (25:19.66)
Yeah.
Adam (25:49.724)
Yeah. Same with even audio books. Like I was listening to an audio book, the latest Brendan Sanderson book, and somehow I downloaded the UK version of it. So it was a different accent than I'd listened to for all the previous editions of the book. And so I'm like, wait a second. I returned it and got the
Ste (26:13.162)
Yeah.
Adam (26:13.602)
the US one, I'm like, okay, these are the narrators I was familiar with that I'd listened to like three other books with the same narration.
Ste (26:21.494)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's the same book, but, you know, in a British accent, you're gonna like, yeah, perceive it a whole other way than, you know, you'd perceive it with your regular narrators. Let's, I mean, what Jeff told us last week about having the narration done by AI, I think he said.
Adam (26:46.588)
Oh yeah, for the Kindle.
Ste (26:48.47)
Yeah, I have to look into that. That sounds great. That was actually something I was thinking, you know, way later down the line we could do because now you have the voice API that works pretty, pretty well. So you can actually choose like your preferred narrator. Of course, with, you know, with skeptical problems that, you know, actual narratives might, I mean, they have, I'm guessing they will be. Yeah.
uh, commissions, you know, to have their voices replicated, I guess, hopefully. But yeah.
Adam (27:24.83)
Yeah, that's, yeah, I'm not optimistic about like the, all of the ethical problems that are gonna come up because of that.
Ste (27:35.919)
Yeah, on the upside you'll be able to choose from a lot of voices, on the downside, yeah, it's probably not gonna be like ideally implemented, especially because you know, Amazon is probably gonna do it first.
Adam (27:50.108)
Have you ever seen the movie The Congress?
Ste (27:53.086)
I don't know, but...
Adam (27:57.034)
It's a.
Adam (28:00.486)
It's a movie, it stars Robin Wright, about an actress who, like, at a point in the future when like, movie studios are reproducing actors and then just using their likenesses in however the studios want. And this came out 11 years ago.
Ste (28:05.002)
Okay.
Ste (28:25.954)
Oh wow, okay yeah. Jesus yeah, that was way ahead of its time. Yeah. Nice, I'll add it to my list. Yeah, any movie recommendation from Adam, definitely add it to your lists everybody. Just good, good tip, good life tip.
Adam (28:28.754)
It's... It is really good.
Adam (28:35.76)
What?
Adam (28:45.028)
One of my friends says that movie is his Roman Empire. It's the thing he thinks about all the time.
Ste (28:49.382)
Nice. Okay, Connie Willis. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't heard about Connie Willis. I will look into that. Yeah, there's also the Black Mirror episode, I think the one where, you know, actors get replicated or was it, yeah, it was something along these lines, right? I forgot what it was about. The one where the actor is the Joker or something like that?
Adam (29:19.232)
Oh
Ste (29:20.23)
It might have been in the last season, where they cede the rights to their personas and the studio can just do movies with their character in any kind of scenes that they like.
Adam (29:41.238)
That's right. That sounds vaguely familiar.
Ste (29:44.378)
Yeah, I don't know. Did they do an episode like that or am I just imagining? They must have done, I remember the scenes, but yeah, then again. Yeah, it's gonna be a very weird feature from this point of view, but yeah, definitely, you know. Even for AI, rating and narration will be important, and even more so for like human narrators.
Adam (30:10.982)
Yeah. Well, speaking of humans doing things instead of systems. So last week we had a talk, let me stop sharing my screen for a bit. We had a talk with Jeff about library and tools and kind of like understanding the gaps in our system, but also like things that we could do to improve and hardcover for that.
Were there any takeaways you had from that discussion on things that we should be thinking about?
Ste (30:43.662)
Yeah, I mean, there's the ongoing discussion that we kind of covered about review bombing and this, I think is a problem, which wasn't on my like bingo cards as a problem that would be this big, but apparently it is this big, it's leading people to have their contracts.
Ste (31:07.57)
rescinded and yeah, it's something that I think we have to prepare. I guess the popularity of the platform right now because we don't have like 50 million users or not even one million for that matter. When we'll have one million, I'm pretty sure we will have this problem. Yeah, it's a pretty...
Ste (31:34.874)
Important one, at least for people I've seen, we appeared on Hacker News in a comment and someone was mentioning review bombing and yeah, it's something we covered last time, a very delicate problem to approach because you don't want to like review...
anyone's posts, you have to sort of, yeah, either guess the pattern or somehow see, yeah, why they might be a review bomber without, you know, putting too much stress on the small team behind hardcover. If we have like, yeah, 1,000 like flags for review bombing at some point,
Adam (32:22.87)
Yeah.
Ste (32:29.49)
You know, we wouldn't be able, I guess, to handle those.
Adam (32:35.238)
Yeah, it's, it's one of those things that's like, how do we algorithmically determine if something is a review bomber? And that's, that puts us in the same problem that every other book platform has. Um, and it feels like no one's like found a solid solution for it. Everyone's kind of created their own or just, you know, we're going to, we're going to figure this out manually when it happens by disabling reviews on a specific book.
Ste (33:01.404)
Yeah.
Yeah, that doesn't... yeah. Yeah, that's kind of like Scorched Earth 4, like a book that, you know, gets locked. You will have a lot of people who just want to review the book and they won't be able to do that because there was one person who review-bombed it, so...
Adam (33:04.458)
which seems to be, it's kind of like Wikipedia locking an article.
Ste (33:24.794)
Yeah, interesting convolve that we have with Jeff. I'm sure he has like plenty more ideas on that subject. And I guess we will like cover it when we get to that point. It's an interesting one. And if we figure out a way to, yeah, algorithmically do that, that'd be great. Especially because I think now we can also analyze not...
necessarily like the, let's say, behavioral pattern, but also the quality of the review, we can just send it to the OpenAI API and somehow describe with the instruction that they need to tell us if they consider these set of reviews, let's say, review bombing. So...
Yeah, luckily there are ways to, I guess, automate it from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.
Adam (34:31.478)
So many of them, I see like the review bombing, not even including reviews, just having a rating. Like all they do is go in and rate it as half a star and then trying to separate those ratings out from valid ratings is gonna be tricky. One of the ways that came up when you were talking with Jeff was, this would only help books before they're released.
Ste (34:38.375)
Yeah.
Ste (34:50.331)
Yeah.
Adam (35:01.11)
But if before a book is released, we only allow people to rate, we only show the rating or the reviews on the site for people that marked that they got it as an advanced review copy. I feel like that, even that little bit, that little barrier of like additional work that someone has to do, which is the work that people that are getting advanced review copies are already doing would...
I don't know, it might hide a lot of those reviews, but then we still have the same problem. As soon as the book comes out, all those reviews from before the book came out would show up unless we just hide them forever, which doesn't seem like a great option either.
Ste (35:45.466)
Well, yeah, we could have a score for that. I mean, we can definitely, you know, seeing the action of review bombing as, let's say someone either with or without a review serial the rates on author's book really low, I think that's like pretty easy to flag. So if some user had like, let's say five,
six half-star ratings or really low ratings for the same authors in a small span of time that could manually get flagged so I guess we'd already like suspect at that point that someone's a review bomber and The way we'd surface those especially if we're
going to figure out how to make the feed so that it shows you, you know, posts according to their weight, let's say. So if something is valuable, according to our system, we push it up. If something is not valuable or abusive, let's say we push it as down as possible. I guess, you know, those reviews.
You'd realistically not see them because we sync them so low because we suspect that someone's a review bomber. And, you know, if they actually are a review bomber, they get banned. So those reviews can be hidden altogether.
Adam (37:21.622)
Yeah.
Ste (37:21.646)
So I think, yeah, it's a combo. It's a combo of manual and automatic, but ideally, you know, our job would just be to validate stuff that's already been processed. So, yeah, if we have someone automatically flagged.
as a potential review bomber, we can just revise it and see, okay, they just read those books and they hate that author, whatever. But if they read all their books in one day and they rated them at the same time, that's not, I mean, that's a review bomber. And yeah.
Adam (38:01.234)
But yeah, even, even that one, like if you just joined the platform and you're going through and reading all your books that you've read before you joined the platform, then it would show up as rating them all today. It's, it's, it's going to be a hard problem, but I, luckily we have some time to solve it. It's not like an emergency for us now, but it's good where at least like talking about all these different solutions that way, um, you can get something in.
Ste (38:13.67)
Yeah, that's true.
Ste (38:25.054)
Yeah.
Ste (38:29.562)
Yeah, I'm wondering if, I mean, review bombing happens directly by someone, right? So the idea is that so many people are doing the same thing at the same time. So if someone by coincidence, yeah, starts really rating a series of book from the same authors really low, and at the same time, a lot of people are doing that.
Yeah, I'm guessing there's a high chance of them review bombing it because other people are doing it in the span of time. So I guess if we just adjust these rules, these parameters, I'm guessing that could be a solution. And if they really didn't like that author, it happens.
Adam (39:03.45)
Hmm.
Ste (39:27.206)
that they just rated the book really low while review bombing was going on. We can just undo it. They can appeal, I guess.
Adam (39:37.822)
Yeah, it sounds like we need some system that almost shows like a dashboard of like books suspected of being review bombed. And it shows the books that are like, that we've calculated a review bomb score, which might be based on like recent low ratings grouped together. Like has a book had a lot of low ratings?
in the past week. And then maybe, like, you know, if it was lots of low ratings, like, spread out, then that's probably not a review bond. That's probably just a book people don't like. But if it's like a sudden spike, then maybe that, like, boosts its score or something like that.
Ste (40:19.704)
Yeah.
Ste (40:29.606)
Yeah, that sounds good. But yeah, very, very sensitive problem. And yeah, surprising that people pay so much attention to it. I mean, yeah, definitely it's like an important one. And I'm guessing, you know, it can affect a lot of like how people perceive and look. Yeah.
Adam (40:44.814)
Thanks for watching!
Ste (40:54.558)
How about you? What other takeaways do you have from last week's Talks with Jeff?
Adam (41:01.298)
Um, one of the ones we talked about some was this idea of having like, uh, so right now librarians do a lot of actions on the site, like marking books as duplicates, changing the addition that a book, uh, that a changing the book and addition belongs to, to be belonging to a different book. So that happens a lot, especially in series. Um, like I was reading, um, the Berserk manga and like there'd be an addition.
that would be part of the book too, but that edition would actually belong to like book nine in the series. And so we had to kind of like move the edition to a different book. And so that's something that happens a lot, but we don't want that to be something that any librarian could do, because if you move the most popular edition of Harry Potter to a different book, all of a sudden everyone's reads, everyone's lists, everyone's prompts are now messed up.
So some of those things need to like go through an approval process. Um, so we talked about last year, last month, having a last week. Time, um, having a, uh, like a, an impact score for how much of an impact. A change is going to make, like if you're moving an addition to another book and no one has done anything with that addition, then, you know, it's not going to have any impact on anyone that it was moved, it's just improving the data.
So we were talking about having like an impact score for changes and then having like an access level for librarians And if your access level is greater than the impact score, then we just do it automatically. We don't require someone on the add someone on the back end to approve it and That would lower the amount of work Jeff and I are doing In all that approval. So that was one of the really good takeaways that I'm like probably gonna start on this week
Ste (43:01.146)
nice yeah that sounds great really good yeah
Adam (43:05.298)
And then, uh, and then I have the page that I think you, you started on. Uh, do you want to talk about that son?
Ste (43:12.755)
Yeah.
Yeah, of course. So right now there are many people who join hardcover and they want to become librarians because they want to add data to the books they're reading, which we don't have. And there wasn't a formalized process to do that. Maybe you had to enter Discord, but we didn't tell you in any place that you have to go on Discord and you have to...
reach out to us and we'll make you a librarian, which is what we did with so many of the talented librarians we have on Discord right now, which will get this opportunity to thank. But now this should be an easy process where you just, if you see book data missing,
from the end of the book page, you jump onto this page where you say, why do you want to become a librarian? So yeah, it's just that book page, if you wanna become a librarian, you hit that. I'm not sure on the wording or even if that's supposed to be there, but yeah, I guess something has to be on the book page because that's the flow you're likely to...
Ste (44:42.203)
have when you bump into this issue. So you're on the book page, book data is missing. Oh, what do I do? I wanna edit this book. Okay, I can become a librarian. And from that, you go here and you apply to become a librarian. You tell us a bit about your motivation. So this can be as easy as, I just wanna add info to this book. And there's also a bunch of...
helpers, which could be optional, but very helpful for us, where you say where you want to contribute. So we have the genres and then we have the languages. Maybe we should put English first, you know, like some sites have like the most popular languages first and then all the others, because there's a lot of languages on this earth. And I'm guessing some of them might, you know.
Adam (45:21.995)
I'm out.
Adam (45:27.97)
Oh yeah.
Ste (45:35.126)
not be so popular as others. Yeah, and then just some requirements, some simple things like you gotta coordinate with other algorithms, you gotta provide accurate edits, and you don't have to intentionally break the rules. And if you agree to all of these, this should be like two, three minute process. This gets passed on to us, we review it, we make sure you're not...
trying to do anything malicious, take a look at your profile maybe, and yeah, then we approve you as a librarian and you get a notification where it says, you're now a librarian, you can edit books, and yeah, you can start doing that. It's really fun, so yeah. Applying for this should be fun as well. So yeah.
Adam (46:31.333)
I could even make that use their username.
Ste (46:33.498)
Yeah, I was actually, I forgot to mention that, but that's what I was thinking. Yeah, to have that as their card. So it's like, oh, look at what this can be.
Adam (46:40.78)
with their profile should it be their avatar there too
Ste (46:45.166)
Well, that could be a thing. I don't know. I didn't put it as an avatar. I just put it as an image, you know, editing jewels. So, yeah, that could be left there. Or if you find an easy way to get their avatar, why not? This is just a div, so yeah, it's editable. Yeah, that'd be fun. Maybe it can appear with a slight delay, so it's like jewels and then boom.
maybe over two seconds, yeah, it's your profile picture. Jeff was even saying that we could have this card like physically made and yeah, I totally agree. At some point we'll hand this to people we want as librarians, who knows, maybe we'll have our own events, our own conferences and librarians with this card get VIP treatment.
Adam (47:31.47)
Thank you.
Adam (47:36.66)
Yeah.
Adam (47:41.503)
We were thinking about having like a maybe like a bi-monthly like zoom call for all librarians kind of do like a state of hardcover also.
Ste (47:54.398)
That's nice, we could mention that in here.
Adam (47:57.931)
Yeah.
Ste (47:59.022)
And that would be just like a private event with all the librarians that want to join, right?
Adam (48:04.082)
Yeah. And supporters probably because they have librarian access.
Ste (48:09.266)
Yeah, that's actually a really fun idea. I'm gonna draw up a visual for that so that we can announce it in the librarians and supporters channel. That's gonna be nice to see some of the people. Some of them we've already seen, the ones that helped us with research. So it's gonna be fun to have this meetup.
Adam (48:18.51)
Thanks for watching!
Adam (48:34.45)
Yeah, this sounds good. Yeah, I'll probably work on getting this in and we can probably also link to it from the edit page since I think the edit page, if you're logged in, you can still get to here, but maybe like, I'll change this note if you're not a librarian. We could change what this note says to be something like,
Ste (48:35.123)
But yeah.
Ste (48:53.811)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (49:01.588)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (49:04.038)
Hey, since you're not a librarian, you have limited access to what you can edit. Do you want to edit more fields than apply as a librarian?
Ste (49:13.65)
Yeah, that sounds great.
Ste (49:18.694)
Yeah, so everyone who signs up is an appender, so you can add book data that's not already there. But if you want to edit book data, yeah, you can become a librarian. And I'm guessing for books that don't have a description, you don't have to be a librarian, right? So people who click that want to add a description on the book page where it's missing,
Adam (49:49.495)
right.
Ste (49:49.522)
they wouldn't have to apply. They can just add the description.
Adam (49:52.969)
Exactly.
Ste (49:55.078)
Yeah, okay.
We should also put in, I think they put in a fix for that. It got mentioned in the discord, but yeah.
Adam (50:08.482)
Wait, for what?
Ste (50:10.81)
For the... when the book doesn't have a description there's a link that's not working and I don't know if we have an issue for that. But yeah, I'll...
Adam (50:18.862)
Hmm. I'll double check that when I'm working on making the description have like line breaks today, which is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Like we just kind of dump the results in a paragraph tag and just let it do its thing. But some of these descriptions are really long. I mean, this is already way too long for me in a single description.
Ste (50:29.246)
Oh yeah, that too.
Ste (50:44.787)
Yeah.
Adam (50:48.446)
Single paragraph.
Ste (50:48.71)
Yeah, we've got a plus one in the chat. So yeah, definitely a wanted feature.
Adam (50:57.851)
Well, that, I think that covers like most of the things in progress and like the highly added things. Is there anything else that comes to your mind where it's like, okay, in the librarian world, tools on hardcover, things that would make things that would make it better for us to get better data? Are there any things that's like, oh, we should do this month?
as opposed to like next time we revisit it in the future.
Ste (51:28.754)
Yeah, I think we've been shipping a lot of updates for librarians lately, so if we can get the stuff on our list, like Discord, Rollsync and...
This community improvement by making monthly meetups is great. That's like I had some sort of community thing on my mind. I don't know what, but this is perfect. So that's great. I think it's in a good place. It's actually, we actually reached that point where I think it's
uh, could be fun to be a librarian and it will also, you know, be a really cool thing if we also get to meet each other and contribute to the book data, uh, which is great. And, uh, I was thinking about, you know, we, we talked about open sourcing. I'm wondering if it would overlap with.
what librarians are doing. I mean, I know I'd be more inclined to contribute to Google data if I knew there was a plan to open source that data so that, you know, that's data that is planned to at least to be open at some point. And, you know, in the meantime, it's something because, yeah, we are.
on the mission to make the most accurate repository of BookData and we've been doing lots of steps in that direction. So it paid off the way it's designed and the way you set it up. So now I guess, yeah, just working on how it's communicated, yeah.
Adam (53:32.642)
Yeah.
Yeah, I, I'm, I'm very much pro like make the data free. Like these are just facts about books. Like we don't need to, we don't need to own the description of these books. Like even though someone on our site's probably writing it, like I, like I have no problems with those, those descriptions being used on anyone who like, you know, hits our API. Um, but, uh, yeah.
One, one, uh, one other thing that just came to mind as you were describing that is a, like right now we have this like referral program and that's one way that people can get a free like supporter, um, access, I was thinking like we could do something that ties in with the, like, not, not exactly the referral program, but something that ties in with our thing that automatically upgrades people to supporters if like,
they do some kind of librarian edits in a month. They might get like a credit towards a supporter. So basically I'm thinking like, how do we reward librarians with free hardcover access? Cause you know, at least the ones that are active that month cause sometimes people will be active some months and not active other months. Maybe like the months they are active, we're giving them some like referral credit in some way.
Ste (54:44.607)
Yeah.
Ste (54:51.473)
Mm-hmm
Ste (54:57.574)
Yeah, that sounds great. And as you were describing it, I was thinking about, our talk with badges, badges are gonna, if we keep track of the contributions, which might also be really fun to show if we can on the book page. So like on GitHub, you have contributors for open source. It would be nice to show the profiles for the librarians who contributed and maybe just how many contributions,
they actually did, but say, Adam, three contributions on this book. It could also be like a thing where, yeah, that would be rewarded somehow. And the same the gift program. Okay, yeah, that's a great idea. Like gifting car cover. Okay. Did you make a note of that, Adam? Because yeah, that's a really good idea.
Adam (55:48.27)
Yeah.
Adam (55:56.498)
Yeah, that would be neat. I have a feeling that's, that's something we could do like before the next holiday season, especially.
Ste (55:57.806)
Yeah. Yeah, just...
Ste (56:05.198)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, and with this incentivization program, it can be a supporter, it can be... I think if we implement badges this year, that's also going to be very, very nice for librarians. I would want to contribute to get the librarian badge.
Ste (56:30.285)
And if the contributions somehow get listed somewhere on the book page, and you can see who contributed to that book, that's even more of an incentive to edit it.
Adam (56:46.35)
Oh.
Ste (56:46.93)
But many people just edit it because they want the book in their library to have good data, which is great. And yeah, we really appreciate that kind of energy.
Adam (56:58.734)
Yeah, I mean, that's really the only way a site works because we can't, like on our small team, we can't manage that many books data. Like we can manage our own libraries, but not everyone's library. So yeah, it's very nice that people are like working on their own libraries. And I think if enough people are working on their own libraries, that benefits everyone. So yeah, that's, yeah, a healthy system.
Ste (57:09.139)
Yeah.
Ste (57:25.038)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well.
Adam (57:29.134)
Well, yeah, I think I'll keep working on all this librarian tools in the coming week and probably implement this join the librarian program thing this week. Although I'm going to be volunteering at Sundance for the next week, so I might be a little bit more offline than usual.
Ste (57:54.496)
Oh yeah, nice, okay. Yeah, getting your winter boots ready. Blowing through the snow to get the Sundance.
Adam (57:59.374)
Yeah.
At least like they do Sundance in a park city and they do showings here in Salt Lake. Um, so the place I'm volunteering at is only, um, three blocks from our apartment, which is nice.
Ste (58:13.846)
Okay, yeah, that's good. That sounds marginally better. Nice. Well, yeah, it's been a really good sum up and see everybody next week for the Hardcover Live 34.
Adam (58:30.094)
Yeah. So this was 33 and I will. Yeah. I'll talk to you then.
Ste (58:36.57)
Yeah, perfect. Have a good one. See ya. Bye.
Adam (58:38.67)
Bye, see ya.