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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 (00:01.2)
hey hey stay how's it going
ste (00:03.685)
hey adam it's going good having
adam (00:05.64)
hm
how is how is your trip
ste (00:11.965)
really nice i was in copenhagen and it's a really nice city really good food you know the norther life styled hook all over yeah and the weather was great it was like sunny like the full three days so yeah i was with my wife and her sister and her boy friend and yeah just walked around
adam (00:23.96)
m
ste (00:41.385)
nice how about you
adam (00:44.22)
um let's see we just watched the super bowl got some wings and pizza just kind of stayed in had a day of it and and ah other than that uh been messing around with a art lately and that's been a lot of fun
ste (00:53.565)
nice
ste (01:02.965)
oh yeah that's up for valentines which turned out freaking great yeah
adam (01:08.02)
yeah it was a lot of fun eh made like a some art neve images of my wife like a trained model of her for like a gift and yeah i was i was amazed at how well it turned out
ste (01:21.085)
yeah that was a pretty complicated thing used it was like something selfhosted and it it was stable diffusion basically but you know something more complicated your self hostedit right
adam (01:34.56)
yeah they have this web i you can run locally and you kind of load it with a model that either you create or download and then you can effectively run something kind of like mid journey on your local computer and it generates it generates image is surprisingly fast so i definitely would recommend that if you're thinking about like trying out a art because it's it's about as easy as mid journey once you kind of learn the basics
ste (02:03.045)
wow yeah that's that's crazy and i'm assuming there's no service to pay i mean it just runs on your lap up or whatever and it's yours the whole thing wow
adam (02:12.42)
exactly if you want to create your own models though that's where it gets a little confusing like like i wanted to create one of my wife's images to be able to put her face on like an artnevopainting um so creating that model took a little more work and but after that models generated you're able to i was able to do everything locally which was fun
ste (02:35.505)
yeah that's that's amazing yeah i've been playing with mid journey myself and some of the results are good some of them are i mean i mentioned that's somewhere like pretty freaky it tends to you know go off track for some things you you prompted for but yeah i think that's the best one so if this one runs as good as mid journey does i mean i've seen the stuff you did it's like
yeah
adam (03:06.8)
the the tricky point is that every model has its own like opinionated decisions made about it so the mid journey model is it's really good at generating things that look pretty good with a very small amount of input in the prompt like it's been trained to do well with shorter prompts so you don't have to be an expert in prompt writing with a lot of other models that i have downloaded you need to be really explicit like you need it like paragraph of text
ste (03:23.365)
m
adam (03:37.08)
in order to have it generate what you want so that becomes its own challenge right there
ste (03:41.825)
yeah yeah yeah this is great i mean opens up so much stuff and also so much bad stuff and good stuff at the same time i've been watching at the roll out of beings knew sydney you know their model named sydney revamped as being chatted because they had that open a merger and it's been like two days and already started generating some really weird
adam (03:52.6)
yeah
adam (04:01.26)
m
ste (04:11.685)
stuff like threatening users and being moody oh my it's so moody they're probably going to tone it down but jesus that attitude from a model i mean ye
adam (04:17.7)
m hm
that's that's tough yeah i mean at least with the the art you can like you can very easily say like yes this is and then whatever the requirements are like n s f w for instance or no it's not with a with a text prompt it's much more difficult to say this is good or this is bad because some people might want that and some people might not but a lot of the time it's just wrong well
ste (04:47.545)
yeah very very wrong i've seen i've seen some stuff it's like creepy but yeah it's i mean it's going really fast everything like i know i'm curious it's gonna be like the same as you know every other fat that's been going on for these past years or if it's gonna you know merge or more in
adam (04:55.86)
yeah
adam (05:00.3)
yeah yeah
ste (05:17.285)
something different but this one looks like it's pretty good i mean i'm like papers from like serious researchers are coming out like every week now so exciting
adam (05:25.04)
yeah
adam (05:33.78)
yeah although giddy images is suing stable diffusion for two trillion dollars
ste (05:40.505)
really wow okay luck
adam (05:43.08)
so that ill that will help determine the future of the space for sure
ste (05:49.005)
yeah i mean yeah i'm curious o that will turn out i think legally it's going to be like tricky to say the list but yeah interesting times from all points of view i guess
adam (06:00.38)
yeah
adam (06:05.4)
yeah yeah if there's some way that artists can get credit and paid for the use of their art that's going into these models that seems like the adopting in and opting out seems like the solution but it seems like we're already like you know the cat's already out of the bag now so what's going to happen
ste (06:23.765)
yeah exactly i was about to say the same thing i mean now that they're trained as just you know tough to control it but then again i guess my like optimistic positive outcome would be that artists get way more valued now that you know it's like so easy to generate general art
oh though yeah let's see how that actually actually works it's fun you know it's gonna turn out you know in some way but
adam (06:56.56)
m
m hm
adam (07:04.6)
hm
aside from the art tide what have you been working on hard covers related lately
ste (07:13.945)
i had to chat with eugene because we're working on the bookjawer and i can show you maybe we can begin with that i can show you some progress on that because he made something that's pretty
ste (07:31.805)
nice wait share my entire screen here we go okay so not this
where is my here we go not this either sorry folks
where was it here it is okay can you see it okay so he actually managed to remove the headless i bit and it actually has a threshold down for closing maybe i could go into the mobile view because that's a bit more relevant so this one use his frame or emotion and yeah it's just that so he managed to do it
adam (07:55.28)
yeah yeah
ste (08:21.545)
exclusively with that and he set the threshhold for how long you have to pull it for it to close so if you just pull it like this it goes up if you pull it all the way down it goes way down so yeah that's that's pretty cool and i think we can use the frame or emotional library for other places in the website right now he's working on this little animation where
adam (08:28.4)
m hm
adam (08:34.139)
nice
ste (08:52.325)
it moves to the left and to the right let's see if i have it here if not
adam (08:57.44)
oh yeah
ste (09:03.945)
okay it's taking a wild to vote anyway yeah decide the movement for the book drawer to make that into a smooth animation so that's going to be pretty cool that's going to be like a really nice interaction i organize yeah it's going to be great and basically this is the tricky one because when you market book has read you have the past reads you have the new reads you
adam (09:19.34)
yeah i like that
ste (09:33.845)
ave the ability to modify past threats and to choose your additions so these are going to be like four different steps and they're all supposed to animate similarly so you just like swish from one the other real fast so yeah once that's done is going to be very nice to go through this whole dialogue
we basically have in the back end the ability to set i mean in the back end back back end the star date and the end date for reading are set right
adam (10:18.04)
uh yeah so right now the way it works is if you if you say you're currently reading a book like if you market book as currently reading it sets the start date as right now so you know it sets it sets it to the date you say currently reading and if you market as read it sets the red date as today only if it's transsitioning from currently reading to read so you know if you're just browsing
and you're like i read this and i read this and i read this it doesn't set the finished at date at all for any of those because you might just be setting a lot of old books that you read years ago so it's only if it transitions from currently reading to read do we set the finished at date
ste (10:54.965)
m
ste (11:04.005)
yeah that's great so it would just take some hooking up in the background and this should be all life after after that eugene was asking me if it needs any more back end work i said maybe but i knew we already saved the dates and the edition so that should be pretty straightforward i'm guessing
adam (11:16.48)
be cool
adam (11:24.44)
no
adam (11:31.9)
yeah i think the hardest part will just be like that the whole book button right now uses x state library to kind of manage the state of the button or the state of the book button and there's certain parts of it that are um loaded immediately when you like that are required to show like this first screen of the button like you need to know the status of the book you need to know the rating
you need to know like the privacy level you need to know if there is a review but you don't need to get like the content of the review because that would be like additional you know if you're looking at a page with a hundred book buttons you don't want to load a hundred reviews you just want to load like if that writer review should say edit a review or something
ste (12:20.145)
yeah let me actually put your review like after you read it on this screen so it's clear
adam (12:30.82)
yeah
ste (12:33.905)
nice okay
yeah after he gets that he'll pass it on on to you and yeah i can chat about yeah it's going to be really nice and finally we'll get this you know out and in a form that really good for browsing in the ap and talking about the ap that's supposed to come out soon right dios
adam (12:43.78)
yeah i'm excited about it
adam (13:06.1)
uh yeah we we submitted it for like final hopefully final knock on final approval from apple yesterday we got in the last fix which was you needed away too
adam (13:28.38)
sign up for a subscription from the p and that was one that we i initially thought that we didn't need that like i thought we could just like disable the ability to sign up at all that way we're not like having them sign up through stripe but now it's it is a requirement in the like a store rules that if you have a paid plan you have to allow sign up so now that will be possible
ste (13:53.245)
yeah that's going to be good i mean i like signing up to apse with my iclobaccount so i just double tap you know the side buttons and instead of going through stripe adding in my credit card so for a users it's going to be a bit more similar hopefully
adam (14:04.2)
m hm
adam (14:15.4)
yeah and i added this i can show you like the hard cover supporter page i added this is the p c when you complete your
adam (14:31.22)
you sign up as a supporter um so it just has this top section which is either like manage through stripe or through apple and this link for stripe and for apple it just tells you like you can manage it through your apple subscription and then added this like fun effect for confetti
ste (14:55.385)
here we go
adam (14:55.92)
and you know basic basic details and information about hard cover and all the membership features and here as we add more of them we'll be able to just put it here
ste (15:09.045)
yeah that's perfect that's great slowly
adam (15:11.94)
very basic but yeah yeah and this and i added this section to to the um the subscription form so like if you go to manage memberships and you're not already a member um there's that screen where it says like sign up for monthly or yearly this is also like a paragraph on there to hopefully incentivize people
ste (15:36.025)
yeah that's very much yeah yeah i mean it's useful to know that her cover at this point is self funded we're both strapped we're like the small team distributed like all over well in us and uopemostly and yeah to just see that and how readers are contributing to it
adam (15:54.5)
m m
ste (16:05.925)
in sustainable i guess that's important because you know once we get to a point where it's good there's also a guarantee so when we're one hundred persons funded uh that would will be further guarantee you know that no matter what you're not going to lose your book lib
you can count on us to deliver more stuff you can count on us to you know add more updates so yeah it's a nice future i'm going to check myself well we do have panel yeah
adam (16:43.5)
yeah
yeah yeah that's one of those
oh yeah
yeah that's one of those features that that's one of those things that i'm always worried about when i use a site too early it's like are they going to like eye like pointed where they're going and they say they want to get there but will they get there so i think this is kind of helping kind of show like where we are today on on getting there
ste (17:13.445)
yeah exactly and as sensitive i mean even with easier stuff i'm worried about the same thing but with books you know where people put hours and hours into building their library it's even more sensitive and you know although we've always been saying that your book library is okay with us even you know if something happens like know book apocalypse you can export your library
and you know you you will have it handy with us so we'll take care of it if we get past this hurdle it's going to be you know a really good guarantee that okay we are here to stay and it's also going to be nice to know that and then the book plat form such as ours actually can make it in two thousand twenty three you know
in the middle of a supposed recession did they call it yet i mean i don't know what i've heard i'm reading stuff every day but it seems like limbo you know declaring whether we're on like
adam (18:29.24)
yeah i'm not sure because i think what there are sessions like multiple quarters of negative growth and i don't know if we've had that yet but it seems right on the edge
ste (18:35.185)
yeah
ste (18:42.525)
yeah but anyway through that were good were thriving it seems to go we've got like two hundred new users signed up nearly or yeah now it was even more than that through around the article published on a work out block was it
adam (18:44.06)
cool
adam (18:48.undefined)
uh huh
adam (18:57.82)
yeah
adam (19:04.68)
yeah it was just a one off link at the end of it and we got a couple hundred sign ups from it which was really cool
ste (19:09.565)
um that's crazy yeah yeah yeah i'm hoping you know book talk or book teeter actually discovers us at some point and they're like oh look at this and yeah
adam (19:25.02)
yeah the view of which we started hard cover masked on account so it's a hard cover a social dot hard cover dot at and it has a like about thirty forty followers so far so just getting set up but have to start somewhere with it twenty five followers ah but one other place to share like
ste (19:46.585)
yeah
adam (19:54.3)
um like i shared like our bata link for our is ap for instance on there yet
ste (20:01.125)
nice yeah i signed up myself it's pretty i'm getting the hang of mastodon that's you know another really cool network through to look into that's nice how new social networks you know the social networks of like this let's say cycle are like
adam (20:08.1)
m m
ste (20:30.925)
showing up including us i mean where the books of network
adam (20:36.18)
yeah yeah there's been one of the common things people have asked on massed on is about like federation for hard cover which i see is more of like a let's let's watch and learn and figure out where that plays in um i don't really have an idea of like what we could do that would most contribute in that space right now
ste (20:37.885)
yeah
adam (21:03.undefined)
i think there's there's potential there especially if like you know let's say that all the other book platforms like you know all the other non good reach platforms let's say that supported federated contents so that you could be on um story graph and see your friends activity on hard cover you could be on hard cover and see your friend's activity on story graft like that would make it really interesting um but it's one of those chicken and the egg things like some platforms have to support it for it to wear
ste (21:13.645)
yeah
ste (21:31.005)
yeah
adam (21:33.62)
um and right now there's bookworm which is kind of the one social fed verse enabled one um but in in the future if we did join that then you would be able to see your bookworm friends activity on hard cover and they would be able to see your hard cover activity on bookworm
ste (21:52.985)
yeah that's going to be interesting i mean basically it's kind of like a meta platform federated meta platform so that's that's pretty that that's pretty cool yeah i'm also curious to see how it plays out i mean if it's you know actually gets adopted or not because that's a problem with like so many things right now there are so many cool things like
ste (22:20.525)
built on really good solid ideas but i'm curious to see if they get adopted uh you this the meta verse what else block chain the good part of black five two percent good parts of the
adam (22:41.undefined)
yeah yeah
ste (22:45.145)
yeah so it's going to be interesting to see how how it plays out and maybe you can also talk about how we're playing to use in our platform because i think among the book networks we're the ones that are closest to finding closest to the use cases that would make a i applied the books meaningful we already have the match score
so we're calculating that we have mariana and alison our team who are working on the algavrdem to make that better and may be even show you like a bregram of why we recommended a book to you based on that match score so that's going to be nice i was also wondering because we've talked about it and i think it's going to be it could be like
resting topic to talk about readers as well to see how i could play into your your reading habits and how that can be used to discover new books and to i guess find authors books stories that
wouldn't be what you would normally read and i think that could be an interesting use case
adam (24:25.02)
yeah yeah it's it's interesting because there's like the a side and there's the just like straight algorithm side and and so much of it can be done with like regular algorithms for things like here are some of the books that are that readers like you also love like that's that's not even a i that's kind of like a um collective
ste (24:36.445)
yeah
ste (24:49.465)
hm
ste (24:52.905)
yeah
adam (24:55.18)
it's called um yeah yeah yeah but then when you get into the site when you're feeding it like that those additional data points like here are all the genres of these books that you like here the author is here the locations and the settings and then at that point the machine learning al the rhythm is determining like oh this person likes um this book set in this setting a little bit more than in this setting so let's figure out how to generate
ste (24:57.925)
uh yeah
adam (25:24.86)
those recommendations like that and i think that's what i'm most excited about for switching from that algorithm to a model for it but still still it was off rat
ste (25:38.945)
yeah but it's exciting i mean i've been playing with on this front and for instance if you you know ask for recommendations from let's say poets and you say i want to read something from a black author that has a goth writing style or something like that you get you know that recommendations in
that pacific area and i think for those like finer things like you mentioned you know you like a certain theme finding a book on a certain theme on on a similar theme would be almost impossible to generate through like let's say match making algorithm where you would look into things other people liked even with tags maybe that could be although you know you could do it
but yeah with this i'm thinking you know you could get those recommendations without having to browse so there would be served to you how accurate yeah i guess that's the question if you actually like yet the good recommendations from from that but you know it might be interesting for many readers including myself
ste (27:12.645)
would rather ask and especially for you know people who are discovering their taste in certain gers and in certain themes and in certain gropes i'm thinking that would be really really nice there's a lot of people reading young adults literature and there's like so many stuff in their h to have something that could help you navigate through
all of that and also like open your horizons to other styles other authors other you know types of stories i think that might be that might be pretty pretty interesting so it's kind of like an assisted browsing instead of you seeing okay readers who are similar to you
adam (28:02.4)
m hm
ste (28:12.925)
this book and this book in this book or this book is similar to these other books because you know of some tags or something this basically let does the browsing for you and you're just asking questions or like guiding guiding it
adam (28:36.88)
yeah yeah i think as we get more more readers on the platform will be able to create those those models that are more targeted towards like a specific individual and i think in the meantime we can do like models that are more targeted to like a book that way they're kind of universal to that book and there aren't they aren't reliant on the reader that's looking at the data having like a whole bunch of books read because
that's one of the issues that we have right now is that if if a reader has only read like three books we don't have much data on them and but then there's also the width of books like there's there's so many books out there that the overlap between them ends up being surprisingly small like you might have two libraries with a thousand books and they might only have like two books in comment or something because there's there's such a
ste (29:29.385)
yeah
adam (29:36.78)
range but yeah as more people join there will be many more similarities that we can build on for that
ste (29:46.565)
yeah and really good points about you know the people who have three books in their library and yeah it's hard for someone who's at the beginning of their reading journey to form a taste i mean it's of course you can watch a lot of people and mimic their taste but developing your own taste i think that's where platform
like platforms like our kin come in where you know you can browse through go down the rabbit hole of what sounds interesting to you and ah if we actually manage to use a i to give you like those recommendations and try to get that tasting books out of you i guess that's that's a win
adam (30:41.undefined)
m hm
yeah yeah i'm imagining something almost like netflix where it's like a page of multiple lists and it's like because you liked you know and then book title or because you liked setting because you liked character or you know because you liked dark moodie time travel and then it shows you books for that theme so you're not like browsing like just a flat list of a thousand books your you're browsing based on like prom
ste (31:03.565)
yeah
adam (31:14.88)
that then you can dive into the ones that sound the most interesting to where you are at that moment
ste (31:21.165)
yeah yeah that sounds i mean exactly that could be something that would help yeah discovering new new things yeah it's really a really giving subject in in this area and i think there's much we we can actually do we are and they are start up i mean all of our coals are about you know working under recommend
adam (31:24.86)
m
ste (31:51.025)
ans models and doing things in in that area i think that's like our differentiator as well so drilling deep into that i think is its key
ste (32:09.465)
i was wondering like this is like question i've been asking myself what's the like the end goal of discovering books of course you know you're discovering books that you wouldn't have discovered otherwise and it makes that discovery easier but i was also thinking you know in terms of how that impact the book in the street there's like stuff that gets probably
and you know it doesn't even see the light of day or it doesn't it sees the light of day but very quickly it fades into oblivion because of multiple factors related to how the book industry works but also uncovering you know stories which wouldn't be uncovered h if you would go through the let's say usual
book recommendations psycho book talk to their bookstagram book blocks the same books that the major publishing houses are putting out and marketing are being basically i guess taken and yeah presented on all of those places but not stories which
be cool but you know you might miss i've actually like in the book section on on is there's a a where people can self publish so they publish short stories and they're like really weird they're mostly like romantic stuff that i wouldn't read but that's like i think top in top the top ten as in the up store in the book section h
adam (34:09.04)
hm
ste (34:09.305)
i got to name it for publicity but that's i don't know that happened i was like well look at this so there's people publishing stuff there there there's people buying the books where the books know what the colt or the short stories and apparently yeah it's the thing so yeah i was wondering how that like discovery could help people who wouldn't like
adam (34:31.1)
uh yeah
ste (34:40.445)
uh benefits from or actually be included in the exposure that major publisher would offer or in that whole cycle yeah it would be nice to see to see that
adam (34:51.44)
yeah
yeah yeah i was i was thinking about that some one some of the calls i've had with people and some of the chat we've had in discord because one of the things that's come up is that kind of like you said like recommendations tend to be towards the popular books so how do you how do you highlight the the ones that are you know they have fewer readers reading them maybe maybe no one's read it on the platform
because you know it's such a new book or um you know it's it's a nice area how do you like show case though in a way and i don't yet know how we can do that without having some people on the platform having read it because that's what lets us know that this book is it is a book that actually is read is read because i mean we have we have like uh five under don
ste (35:49.545)
yeah
adam (35:53.58)
and books on the site and only like fifteen thousand of them have been read by someone r's like three hundred and eighty thousand books that no one's read
ste (36:01.885)
look
ste (36:05.685)
yeah that's crazy how did we end up with the i mean people imported them right at some point
adam (36:07.48)
and
adam (36:11.1)
ah these are the ones from open library from the initial import
ste (36:14.045)
okay okay
adam (36:17.3)
yeah there's so it's like all those books that we can't really recommend like they don't show up in any um match percentage scores because if no one's read it then we can't get a match percentage score for it um but but but you have the same problem for like a new author who is writing their first book and is trying to get the word out about it like that has to be someone who starts reading it um and that's what kind of spurs the data to start
ste (36:27.145)
yeah
ste (36:31.365)
yeah that's crazy
adam (36:47.18)
um so one of the things that comes to mind is like how we maybe like incentivized people to read books that no one has read on the platform before like be the first reader of this book and maybe like you get a badge or something you get you get some kind of thing for being the first reader to read a book on hard cover
ste (37:08.145)
yeah that would be great i mean that always sounds great i saw literal had the activated author accounts and
ste (37:22.545)
i'm guessing you know it would work with something in that area but yeah exactly incentifiing readers because that's you know the important thing having people read a book that's like really really obscure i'm wondering if like book dat has any part in that the majority of books are like ill described or like not
surface because of the weird description i know open library has a lot of really random descriptions for books and if you get the book that has no cover and has a weird description i mean it might be like the you know best book of your life you're not going to like pick it up you might not even find it like anywhere to buy so i'm wondering if book data like you
act because i know we've been talking about providing better book summaries with with a so basically at least for you know
that's say important books would be able to get that data along with other data as well about the author about the genera about the tags
adam (38:38.36)
okay
adam (38:43.2)
yeah
adam (38:52.32)
yeah i think yeah i think even if we have all the data about a book because some of those books that like of those three hundred eighty thousand we have all the data about the book we have um books genres we have description locations characters but just no one's read it like no one no one search for it and say they want to read it m yeah so it's it's like it's you know we only have
ste (39:17.505)
books
adam (39:22.06)
two thousand readers so there's only so many books that are going to have have been accessed but my my thought is that you know in in a year from now if we have ten times this amount of users or a hundred times then i think it will kind of just that will kind of fix itself over time as just more people join
ste (39:42.785)
yeah true true well if it goes like this if we have events like the one that happened over this weekend
it's gonna it's going to be good and i'm waiting for you know the moment when will actually implement discussions in some form because that's going to be the reason why all the people who are currently on subbredts or on facebook groups or on book talk would actually make the move somewhere where they can actually talk about
adam (39:52.58)
yeah
ste (40:22.405)
book right now it's a bit indirect you can talk about the book reviews you can
ste (40:31.085)
let people know what you're reading status is indirectly but yeah when discussions happen i'm really like hoping now we get some good discussions that become a reference you know in the book industry i'm yeah let an definitely happen i've seen stuff on tiktok authors who
adam (40:54.12)
yeah
ste (41:01.465)
published their book and no one read it and somehow you know someone filmed them and the video went viral and they're a best seller
adam (41:09.1)
m hm
yeah
ste (41:15.345)
that's nice i mean the good part of tiktok now it's good but i'm wondering you know if that can happen on a platform like ours that's going to be
adam (41:15.54)
yeah
m hm
adam (41:22.86)
yeah
ste (41:32.125)
pretty offering that exposure that initial
adam (41:32.42)
yeah
adam (41:38.88)
yeah and and speaking of which maybe that can become a good jumping off point for our team meeting this saturday i was thinking about doing an exercise about like prioritizing parts of the book page and how we like structure that maybe some even some sketching exercises but mostly like hierarchy is what i think most
ste (41:58.805)
m hm
ste (42:06.905)
m hm
adam (42:08.74)
portant right now is is understanding like um this is our hypothesis on the areas of the book page that deserve the most prominence and how we structure that from information architecture standpoint with with like discussions in mind even though we don't have them yet but we can start like planning it with that as part of it
ste (42:23.865)
hm
adam (42:35.5)
i think yeah i think after the book button that will be probably the next the next big page to take it a reba
ste (42:44.825)
yeah that sounds great i mean definitely a good exercise and definitely good to think about that patisation with discussions in mind thinking about the architecture usually saved our ass like a lot of times until this point we actually have a huge app and small ment is actually like manageable so
adam (43:02.6)
m hm
ste (43:15.005)
definitely this way of working has proved to be a success so yeah definitely at let's talk about the book page and i'm excited to see how how that comes out because we've already like been through it i think for the past two months like had multiple passes at what data we can show and how that data can be structured
adam (43:21.6)
yeah
ste (43:44.745)
right now i think it's settled enough for us to be able to deliver those functional those features those really nice experiences that readers expect from from the book page
adam (44:03.94)
yeah one o one kind of open question which i think we'll probably have to talk to more users to really nail down is this idea of um discussions versus book clubs versus like a sincrinis book clubs and how we like incorporate those concepts because discussions are one thing like there's like you know
ste (44:24.605)
hm
adam (44:33.72)
say we used i've read it model for discussions with voting down voting or you know something like that then that's like one that that solves one use case for i want to talk about a book with some other readers um i'm wondering about the book club side i have some hypothesis on it myself but i'm curious what what your thoughts are when you hear like book club
ste (44:36.465)
okay
yeah
ste (44:48.225)
yeah
ste (45:03.105)
uh in general
adam (45:05.undefined)
yeah related to hard cover
ste (45:07.505)
uh yeah it's going to be really interesting i mean the way book platforms and i've seen this done by many or of our competitors as well they think of a book club like a group of people who are into the same genera they're pretty similar so they form club where they're reading the same thing or a list of things
uh and they synchronize their readings so that it's fun and they have something to talk about but i think that's closed in my mind that promote something that is not open it's like a closed circle and i'd rather have it much more open that's why i mean that
i read it is so good of course you know it is about everything so nishing it down would make sense
ste (46:19.065)
i think the core feature here would be for for me when i think about book clubs to be able to see what other people have talked about when they have read or when they are reading or before they have read certain what questions they asked before reading what concerns they had
and yeah seeing it in real time and reading with seeing which people read that book at the same time i think it would be would be nice but i just don't wouldn't want them to be closed i've seen this on some other platforms where if you want to join a book club it's really how should i call it
clusive experience where you kind of feel that you're intruding somewhere i don't want to feel like i have to you know gain access somewhere because when others are doing that so we can provide you know the other side of things and yeah it's a personal choice i'd rather be a thing
out in the open and allow me to interact with people but not
ste (47:59.845)
have that really set structure like we're reading this people can do that people have facebook groups have i won't ask myself you know if we do discussions why are we doing discussions what do we provide for people that they can't find on facebookgroups or read it or other places where like discords or what's up groups where they organize book clubs i'm wondering because you
adam (48:04.34)
yeah
ste (48:29.805)
you are part you became part of some book clubs and talk to some people in book clubs yeah what's your opinion regarding that like interaction in general
adam (48:42.08)
yea the the book clubs that i've been a part of i've really liked the like the things that the things that i have really liked about them are like getting to know a small group of people that's been interesting and fun but also the kind of the guided prompts where we're all like discussing specific things and i think i think
part that i'm less excited about for like book clubs is that like you know sometimes the books that are chosen are ones that i really am that excited about so you know and but i'm like i'm with this group of people so i'm going to read the book
ste (49:28.705)
oh
adam (49:30.56)
so one i really like the idea that for our ur book clubs there's still that sense of community within a book a book discussion group kind of like the same way there's a there's almost like a sense of community within a sub redit really like you know each sub redit has their own terminology their own things that have kind of organically shown up from people just talking in that subredt my hope would be we were able to do something
similar to that for discussions and while still keeping like some kind of sense of like moderation from like with with a book club you have an owner of the book club who is able to say like this person's bad they need to be kicked out and i think for discussions we're going a need to do the same thing where um maybe like the first person who starts a discussion in a in a book
ste (50:03.125)
hm
ste (50:18.245)
yeah
adam (50:29.9)
maybe they can apply to be the or like you know it's almost like an in four square when you're like the mayor of a of a location it's like like you could if you are interacting with that sub discussion book discussion then you can become the moderator of that discussion group and be able to moderate it there would still need to be checks and balances for abuse but the people that are the most active
ste (50:39.325)
okay yeah
adam (50:59.78)
feel like should be the ones that have some of the most control all things considered with a lot of caviots
ste (51:07.545)
yeah yeah now that's good i completely agree that would be a good model
ste (51:17.945)
and as providing that that space i think is going to be when i mean the ability to talk around books and browse on book specific social network i think is going to be key here and this what the other networks don't have because i've noticed this part of some faceboo
groups one is like i think like a couple of hundred thousand readers and it's i mean hell breaks loose there's no way to like tag a certain book moderation is like a major thing there are some books that come up like all the time and the moths have to come in and bantom so yeah that degree of you know
moderation is needed it would be really nice if you know the whole ap the whole heart cover can be you know that that that space where you feel okay and we don't get i think part of the problem with book groups being posted on non like book specific networks is that you get a lot of random people who like interfered with with that so
hope is that if we're like at least at the beginning will catch a break because all of our users are good like readers they appreciate rules they appreciate structure so yeah hopefully moderation won't be such a drag but yeah that's for mat i mean i'm always a fan of making it as generalized as possible to allow like the maximum
ah let's say possibility and the maximum flexibility that would allow any reader to basically do whatever they imagine that books tag authors ta gen stag like tropes and yeah basically have that mesh of discussions around references that only happen
ste (53:44.585)
it's on hard cover and that you can only get on hard cover without giving them too much structure so allowing supports to make their own book clubs definitely i think that's going to be a nice you know addition to the whole thing and at the same time that feeling of exclusivity could also play out nicely if we allow
book clubs to be you know to have stuff which is nice like badges maybe or profile picture or some kind of you know theme i mean how we said the theme i think is pretty important i know i'm following this guy on twitter and he's had is ap purchased by snap chat it's an ap where teen agers can compliment each other anonymously
ste (54:47.125)
at some point they have to pay he's made like a whole lot of money and then he sold it to snap chat and only took four months from like it's beginning to like selling it which is great i mean yeah but that like set up where offering the niger's a space where they could compliment now
adam (54:59.3)
m m
ste (55:14.805)
mostly and the game was basically finding out who complimented you so it created this like really nice positive interaction of course it was monetized but whatever it's it's nice i mean it created like a positive outcome from my point of view because it allowed people to say nice things and focused on those nice things so i viewed that as a
cool example of setting things up for a specific outcome and just like really find tuning some things in the mechanics and in the design of what you're doing to achieve that so if we manage to you know do the same with book clubs with book discussion so that we're just like really nice place where you can talk about a book and uh yeah maybe on the long run like take it
interaction maybe to another level i think yeah thinking about this and like really limiting while at the same time allowing maximum flexibility is
ste (56:30.745)
good good approach
adam (56:33.18)
yeah yeah yeah i think one part that you mentioned that stands out to me as like as as people start having discussions in you know they read a book let's say you know they read tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and now they posted a discussion about it or maybe they after they finished we had some started questions that they could answer about it just from their reading experience whatever it is
at that point those discussions live kind of with that book and how do we like showcase those and other parts of the app in a way that lets them be discoverable which is like for someone who's not like explicitly going to that book and then going to the that book's discussions but someone wants to still have those or maybe maybe they don't maybe you only want to see those discussions if you've like
read the book or our interest in the book or like you've you've you've marked that book as want to read or something um see how we how we how we like show those discussions across the rest of the apt i think is still going to be a something we'll need to figure out as well as part of like the the overarching feature
ste (57:55.485)
yeah definitely but i mean i'm confident i can like sense that there's a solution to that mainly because we have some tools at our disposal because of the way we were smart enough to build hard cover so we have the feed we have the discussions there the feed item itself could be like a way to show those things in other parts of the but you know keeping them as come
is this possible yeah basically i think it's a compossibility problem and we'd have to i guess the tricky part would be to see which like category comes on on on top if that makes sense so if the book club category in golf is like over discussions or if it's the other way around or how does that interact with
there parts of the a yeah it's a sensitive problem but i'm guessing you know maybe it's just like the designer and me talking there's a solution everything
adam (59:05.88)
yeah it'll it'll be it'll be a fun problem yeah
ste (59:10.605)
yeah definitely yeah it's going to be a fun one great well i think we're almost at time
adam (59:19.68)
yeah when i call it here and probably go get go get some lunch
ste (59:24.545)
yeah yeah that's perfect yeah i'm going to go watch i don't know what let's see well nice talking to you and yeah by everybody
adam (59:32.14)
cool
adam (59:37.5)
by have a good night