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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 (00:01.039)
Hey, hey, stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.448)
Hi, it's going well. everybody. Welcome to High Cover Live number 55. It's been good. I'm getting settled in Paris. It's going well.
Adam (00:16.736)
Very cool, very cool. Yeah, we had an interesting week with some DevOps work we had to solve this week, which was kind of exciting.
Ste (00:29.92)
Yeah, I noticed that Discord was lit up for that one. But it's been good. I'm imagining for you it was really, really fun to dig into all the stuff that was happening.
Adam (00:43.981)
Yeah, it was, yeah. So what happened was, someone started hitting our, Google cloud bucket to download all of the images from every book cover and edition. And, they ended up hitting it about 10 ,000 times a second for like a night and downloaded about 15 terabytes of data, which we don't even have that much data. We only have a couple hundred gigabytes if that, so they were downloading everything. What?
That's like 30 times. but yeah, so because of that, our, bill from Google this month spiked a couple hundred dollars, 300 bucks at least. And so we tried to put into place like a, a really quick way to fix that so that, you know, if someone tried it again tomorrow, it wouldn't cost us another couple hundred bucks. And I was able to get that in place pretty fast the day of.
Ste (01:16.778)
Yeah.
Adam (01:43.853)
I read a blog post about it and, yeah, it's, have a temporary solution in place. That's a solution for it, but I like to get something else for the longterm still in place.
Ste (01:56.502)
Yeah, it was nice that we ended up number one, I think, on Hacker News, which is like a dev blog. Developers loved that one. They loved that post where, you know, I mean, it wasn't like really that fun for us, especially, you know, the cost and you having to do all the extra work with all the stuff we have on top of that. But hey, at least it gained us some visitors. So there's that.
Adam (02:26.248)
Yeah, it's like anytime you can use a problem or something happening that's going wrong to turn it into a positive, it makes it sting a little bit less.
Ste (02:41.384)
Yeah, yeah, well, I guess that's what startups are sometimes about, but it's good to have that. And, you know, the person who did this wasn't doing us any favors, but at least, you know, it's under control now. So I guess that's the positive lesson to learn from all of this. Yeah.
Adam (02:55.564)
Hehehe.
Yeah.
Adam (03:03.658)
Yeah, it's, it sent me down kind of a path of like, what can we do to, to, you know, improve our infrastructure and our hosting for hardcover. So that's like an area that I've always been very like fuzzy on. Like I, like when I've worked at startups, someone else would handle all the DevOps work and I would kind of focus on application building, like, you know, product development. So.
Ste (03:31.191)
Yeah.
Adam (03:32.704)
That's an area that I consider myself somewhat weak at. So this week has been a little bit fun, just digging into those areas and trying to understand more of like how to deploy something with Kubernetes or how to use cloud, cloud flare pages or things like that.
Ste (03:50.45)
Yeah, yeah, it would be great to have someone dedicated on DevOps, let's see. But yeah, with us growing, I I was even wondering when we'll get like, really, this was unlikely a malicious attack or maybe it was. But yeah, I was wondering when we actually get malicious attacks. I mean, we do have competitors, we do have like, and people on the internet. So I'm guessing, you know, the longer we do this and the bigger we are, I guess,
that's like bound to happen. But yeah, it would, I mean, it would be nice to not happen again, I guess. So people, please don't download like our images 30 times next time. Would do us all a big favor.
Adam (04:23.222)
Yeah.
Adam (04:31.422)
Yeah, and.
Adam (04:36.864)
Yeah, at least that one should be fixed for now. And I think the solution I'm leaning towards for the long term is Cloudflare has this thing called R2 buckets on Cloudflare, which are kind of like...
Adam (05:00.82)
to Cloudflare. They're kind of like a...
a source kind of like that sits in front of a, an existing bucket. like in front of our Google cloud bucket, and then, they don't charge for bandwidth on it. So it's kind of like a free CDN. So like we could potentially change our access to the Google cloud to use that, but then people would still upload to Google cloud. And so I kind of like this approach because then
We kind of have a backup of everything that's ever been uploaded because it'll exist on Google and on Cloudflare. So it kind of gives us a free bandwidth or cheap bandwidth plus a backup source of that data. Because right now we don't have a backup of what's in Google Cloud bucket. So if that disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't have like a good way to get back up and running. So this both gives us
Ste (05:52.929)
Okay.
Adam (06:03.184)
better bandwidth and we don't have to use signed URLs and it gives us a backup. So that's what I'm leaning towards and researching out now.
Ste (06:12.798)
Okay, that does sound good. mean, I don't understand the technical part of it, but that sounds like it's solid. Maria was saying in the chat that we need some of those white hat hackers, right? That's what they're called, that signal like possible entry points and weaknesses. Yeah, we're doing it. Actually, shout out to someone who reached out on, I think it was Python, if I'm not mistaken, for telling us there was a breach in how we developed
authentication with the images. yeah, we actually do have those. And when you open source, I'm hoping, you know, lots and lots of people will actually point out stuff that's going on. Not only bugs, but, you know, stuff like this. I mean, this is, I guess, a bug. But, On the DevOps side.
Adam (07:03.242)
Yeah.
That's, that's another good part about even just writing up a, like a recap of what happened. So many people gave feedback on like, why are you doing this instead of this? And all of those, while some of them were a little snarky, they were all like good natured suggestions on things to investigate. So I ended up with a lot of like, basically a reading list of like, learn more about these seven topics, which, which was nice. Cause I mean, how often do you get that much feedback?
Ste (07:31.98)
Yeah.
Adam (07:35.328)
that quickly.
Ste (07:36.72)
Yeah, exactly. mean, there is a problem with the style, I guess. That's like how the developers talk. I've been getting like the same when I was using Stack Overflow for like, I mean, I was learning to code and yeah, I know what you're looking at. And I've seen those on Hacker News, but they do come from a place that wants to help, I guess. So it's really good.
Adam (08:01.516)
Yeah. And, someone in the chat asked about, when that ended up, if you, we've, moved to R2 when we ended up paying for storage twice. And the way it works is like, you have a R2 bucket and you link it with an existing Google cloud bucket using your private key. So you're able to make your Google cloud bucket private. So no one can download things straight from there. And then it, it ends up being in, kind of like, I think they call it like a
like a backup mode where the first time anything's requested from the R2 bucket, it downloads it from Google and caches it and creates it in your R2 bucket. And then it serves it from there going forward. So you would still pay for the access or for the storage space on both buckets, but you wouldn't have to pay for the bandwidth much on the Google bucket. You would only pay for bandwidth on the R2 bucket, because that's the one that's really doing all the transfer outward. So yeah.
I'm still researching it, but that's the idea at least.
Ste (09:08.992)
That sounds good. Nice. Now with the problem all under control and us exploring that, should we move on to today's topic, which is stats again.
Adam (09:24.68)
Yeah, we were, yeah, we, made some good progress last week. Do want to, don't want to start with where we left off and kind of use that as a bridge to, talk about, similar stuff.
Ste (09:36.566)
Yeah, for sure. Let me share my screen. Here we go, entering Figma. last week, what we did is figure out this beginning part of the stats page, which would also mean that we'd have to redo the header for the profile. And that's a cool opportunity to...
implement some features that we've been thinking about, like having a custom cover photo, like you do on Leatherbox, and this one would be like the minimized version of the header. So over here, you'd get your profile pic, your username. So this would happen, you know, right now when you click on your profile.
name right here. So this is the first tab. It's like info about your profile. And then when you click on the other tabs, you kind of like get the full info. Right now we're thinking to just keep, you know, some essentials like your name, username, how many books you've read just for someone else visiting the profile. If you're a supporter or not, of course, to show off that flare and the follow button.
And yeah, last week we've ended up with this. So this would be like a snapshot. This would be like the header, what you get when you enter the stats page. And here would be a tab that would allow you to navigate through stats sections and through the dates. So this would be like your life in books, but you could also like make it into your marching books.
And I had an idea about that. actually tagged you in a comment, Adam. I was thinking maybe it would work, I put like a little comparison in here, to have like a themed background image for this section right here. So I was thinking that for each month we could have like a themed background and for the other, like,
Adam (11:37.644)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (11:47.83)
You
Ste (11:52.502)
time spans, so if it's your life or a custom date range, you'd get like the most popular genre you've read in that range, or for instance, here, you're the cover for the most popular genre, just to make this more shareable. I don't know, do you think it's more shareable or like, is it too distracting?
Adam (12:15.048)
No, I like the very like subtle background. I think it's hard to get backgrounds with text over them that look good. But I think since this is so text focused, the background doesn't have to be very like stark. can be, it can be very subtle.
Ste (12:32.426)
Yeah, yeah, just to make, mean, I'm thinking people will post this to Instagram and you know, you'll get maybe if you want to share this, you will get different numbers here, but it would be nice to also get a different graphic. So yeah, I was thinking, okay, what graphic could we put there so it's not too annoying and it's still fun. And yeah, maybe we could make like an image for each month. That would be nice. And the graph will change.
So there's also going to be this. Yeah. And right now we're at the point where we figured out this section. So from now, we're trying to rethink our currents that has stats page, which is this one, and trying to get a feel of how we can make it even better. And I think...
this live is about figuring out what to actually put in there, taking into account what we've heard people want from stats and what sort of is our hunch to what stats are most important to people. So yeah, that's what we're gonna try to find out.
Adam (13:54.974)
Yeah. Do you want to, so yeah, we were thinking about kind of jumping from Figma back over to mind map and kind of just like trying to map out like all the different sections of this page, what problems they're solving kind like a high level of like, what stats would we even want to create designs for? Cause I have a feeling we could just keep creating stat widget designs for
Ste (14:04.876)
Yes.
Adam (14:24.138)
years and just adding new ones. So it's really about just like, what are the, what are the reasons people would look at their stats and what are the, what, what is the takeaway they want from them? And then we can create those stats based on the takeaways that we want people to have from it.
Ste (14:42.39)
Yeah, sounds great. Let me stop sharing the Figma screen and we can go into mind mapping. Map our minds, map the ideas.
Adam (14:47.136)
Yeah. Yeah.
You
Yeah, so we have, so let's see, let's call this reader stats. And.
So I know one of the areas that we have is on that navigation, we talked about it going to different sections. So we talked about it, overall takeaways on your books, overall takeaways on authors, on genres, on moods.
Adam (15:33.398)
would be some other, like, highest level takeaways.
Ste (15:33.954)
Let's.
Ste (15:37.764)
Let me look at what we have now. So we have genres, then we have moods, then we have kind of like a comparison. The referrals you have. So people discovering books because of you. We also have that. So we say four readers discovered whatever book because of you. We have formats. So reading versus listening.
Adam (16:03.634)
I'll put that under under books.
Ste (16:06.849)
Yeah, yeah, good point. Yeah, most referred readers and that seems to be it. So I think those would be like the high level. What else could...
we have as broad categories. reading would be under books, right? So how fast, how much you've read, that would be under books. List, yeah.
Adam (16:26.869)
I that's...
Adam (16:34.292)
Yeah, I guess we have lists and prompts, which we'll have to figure out what we want to even indicate here.
Ste (16:40.842)
Yeah, and maybe librarian stats for whoever's a librarian. Maybe this is like a...
Ste (16:50.03)
here we go. What else, what else?
Adam (16:52.736)
So let's see.
Adam (16:58.612)
I'm just like pulling up hardcover and seeing what jumps out when I go to a book page.
Ste (17:05.822)
Yeah, reviews are in their books.
Ste (17:13.794)
Hmm.
Adam (17:20.917)
So it's like most liked reviews.
Ste (17:22.474)
Yeah, that's about your reviews, I guess.
Ste (17:30.048)
Yeah, we could. This is like a very good area to do stuff. Someone mentioned on the Discord that when they make a review, they would like some stats that are different from stars. you'd get some... Those were basically moods, I guess. So they were like, how spicy is a book? How...
many, so I guess how sad the book is or how emotional that book made you. So you'd have stars, you'd have like some chili peppers, you'd have some tears, you'd have some, and I'm guessing for reviews, those stats could be like here. So you can see like how many books you've rated as spicy, how many books you've rated as emotional, how many books you've rated as, and how often you do that.
Kind of like sentiment analysis. Yeah.
Adam (18:26.538)
I think for that, yeah, I'm thinking for that since that would involve like kind of changing the review page. Maybe we can push that one off for now and kind of based it on the data data we already have for it.
Ste (18:38.146)
That okay.
Okay, so it's just that that yeah, yeah that makes sense
Adam (18:44.364)
because for that, yeah, we would need to intaking a lot more data on the review page, which, you know, we might get to that point on this and we'll be like, we need to add that to the review page and loop that into this refactor as well, but.
Ste (18:55.532)
Yeah.
Yeah, that sounds good. Maria is saying, for Librarian, it would be good to have some internal stats. Yeah, internal stats that we make public. I guess that could be cool. Some people have been asking us, how many books do you have on hardcover? How many, like, millions of books? Do you think that's, this was for Librarian stats, so how many books are still waiting to be updated?
Adam (18:59.328)
Yeah.
Ste (19:21.94)
images, authors. We do have, like, we actually pulled up some stats about books without covers or books missing info. yeah, I think some of those we could make public, I guess. So these would be like stuff we're seeing. But
Adam (19:38.859)
Yeah.
Adam (19:42.252)
I would see that less as a stats page and more of like a librarian page to help librarians add more data that's missing. I would see this stats as more like, here's how many edits you did, here's how big an impact you had, yeah.
Ste (19:52.301)
Yeah.
Ste (19:57.25)
So personal stats. Yeah, okay. Yeah, let's focus on those. So pages.
Adam (20:08.46)
So like.
Adam (20:15.693)
This could be like a GitHub style calendar.
Ste (20:22.424)
Mm.
Ste (20:26.058)
Yeah, a book calendar would be nice. I know where it would fit. So like a calendar view of the books you've read, kind of a Gantt chart. So to see the books you've been reading.
Adam (20:52.04)
Yeah. yeah, I'm curious about that one since, story graph just launched like their calendar thing. So I'm wondering how we like differentiate from that.
Ste (21:06.457)
Yeah, that's... we could just say that... Yeah, for the monthly view we could put the books that you've been reading that month and I'm guessing, yeah, it wouldn't... So basically your current reading.
Adam (21:34.156)
So yeah, I'm like going through and seeing like, what are, for authors, we have like most red. So it's like a.
Ste (21:45.282)
Yeah, this is overall, yeah.
Adam (21:48.46)
It's like a list of your most read authors overall. Maybe something like...
Adam (22:00.944)
Most owned.
Ste (22:13.866)
It would how high or low you've rated some authors be like here that goes for books as well. Like, yeah, highest rated.
Adam (22:14.32)
Hmm
Adam (22:19.724)
Mm.
Adam (22:32.17)
Yeah. Cause if it's highest rated, would need to.
Like, if they've only read one book by an author and rated a whole bunch of authors, like they've only read one five star book from an author. It could probably, it could probably be the one that they've rated the most that has at least like two or three.
Ste (22:45.898)
Yeah, but...
Ste (22:49.973)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, that's true.
Ste (22:56.362)
Yeah. Let me see. I'm looking like if.
Adam (22:58.368)
I guess for books we need, at a high level, like total books read. And this could be like...
over the time period.
you know, because this is our.
Adam (23:17.839)
This would be like a...
Adam (23:24.118)
maybe a line chart or something.
Adam (23:30.964)
See how pages read is kind of like books read, pages read.
Adam (23:40.406)
Yeah, probably like some kind of rating.
Ste (23:44.716)
Yeah, rating comparison. mean, how you've rated books maybe over the bar chart.
Adam (23:56.157)
Yeah, there could be like, like an overall one that's reading by part chart and then maybe like a
Adam (24:05.445)
I was thinking like would ratings over time make sense, I mean, your rating isn't gonna differ much over the years.
Ste (24:14.23)
Yeah.
Adam (24:17.932)
But there is like ratings above below average. This is something that's in our current one that's really neat.
Ste (24:25.77)
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, like a comparison compared to some other period. this would be that. that's your historical average. we'd see if this month you were below that average or above that average. So if you were in a better mood maybe and you read better books, I'm guessing this could be interesting.
Adam (24:56.267)
Let's see.
Adam (25:00.802)
and
Ste (25:02.636)
The genre, the genre, yeah. Okay, so we have like in the chat, Mara is saying total books owned. This could be like over how many books did you mark as owned over that time period?
Ste (25:20.79)
or and book genre.
Ste (25:27.796)
would genre fit in... Yeah, genre would fit in genre basically.
Adam (25:36.0)
Yeah, we could do something like.
Ste (25:37.184)
Yeah.
Adam (25:43.722)
you know, genre breakdown where it's like,
Ste (25:49.164)
what type of genre you read over that time period, then this would be a bar chart, I guess, or a list, yeah.
Adam (25:53.332)
Yeah, like a list of, yeah, it could be a bar chart. It was some quick way of seeing like you've read this much of that genre, this much of that genre. And then, you know, we could also do this as a pie chart to see.
Ste (26:06.16)
-huh.
Ste (26:11.616)
Yeah, by chart, yeah.
Adam (26:14.656)
And then there's like a genres over time, or it's like a bump chart over time. This is like the, one we have at the bottom where it looks like a steam chart where it's like,
Ste (26:27.734)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, I like that one. That's a really cool one. Yeah. There's also the comparison, genre versus mode and genre versus rating. I think there's a lot we could do to... That's a really cool stat, but I'd improve the clarity on that one. So that's...
Adam (26:34.048)
And we can do the same here.
Ste (26:55.542)
Would that fit? So we do have genre over mood. I was trying to see how I would explain that to someone. So genre over mood, let me bring it up so I see what I'm talking about. So genre versus mood by rating. this one would compare your genres to...
Adam (27:03.119)
Thank
Ste (27:25.11)
your moods and depending on the rating you gave that book it would score higher or lower on that on the matrix we have.
Adam (27:44.285)
Right, that was just a...
Ste (27:44.844)
But what would be a better way of explaining it? I know that that was like totally like.
Adam (27:52.072)
Yeah, this is the one we're talking about.
Ste (27:54.878)
Yeah, so you have genre on the X column, have mood on the Y column and
Adam (27:57.259)
Eh.
Ste (28:07.372)
Basically, you rate a book... So no, it would be the other way around, So let's say the dystopian and tense books you've read have a very high rating on your chart, so you're likely to enjoy books that are tense and dystopian. Would that be like...
a good way of explaining it.
Adam (28:38.954)
Yeah, the greener something is, the better you like that. So my highest according to this looks like it's funny war movie, funny war books, which I don't, not a genre. So what does that even look like? So if I hover over funny war, it's...
Ste (28:48.792)
My new workbooks. well.
Fair enough, I guess.
Ste (28:59.384)
Funny where is it? Is it like Kurt Vonnegut or like, I don't know, Catch 22 stuff?
Adam (29:04.182)
I mean it has Hunger Games, Fellowship of the Ring, and Elantris in there. So it's self -identified tags for those, which I don't know if I'd consider Hunger Games or Fellowship to be in the funny category.
Ste (29:11.094)
Okay.
Ste (29:17.88)
I mean Fellowship of the Ring may be funny. mean they do crack some jokes. Yeah, Hunger Games, that's not really funny, but maybe it's funny. No, it's not funny. That definitely isn't funny. Yeah, yeah, this is an interesting. I was thinking, you know, we could like point people out what they should get from this chart.
Adam (29:21.462)
Yeah.
Ste (29:46.722)
point out to people what they should get. So the greener the rating, the more you enjoy that combo.
Adam (29:58.006)
Yeah. Like we could change the, the, calculation of colors so that it's there's more differentiation. Cause I know for me it's like all green because, but I have a feeling like very few of them are going to go down to one for a section or all the way up to five. So probably between like three and a half and four and a half is like where most of the gradients are going to need to be.
Ste (30:07.138)
Yeah.
Ste (30:10.707)
Yeah.
Ste (30:24.204)
Mmm.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Adam (30:30.047)
So if you wanted to do.
something like this.
Ste (30:37.228)
Maybe we can even highlight here the best combo or the best free combos that you like. So it's clear to people that, you know, that this is what this is about.
Adam (30:48.342)
Hmm. So like the, the person creating the S the owner of the stats page, like highlights specific, parts of it or like selection.
Ste (30:57.362)
no, just like the greenest, the stuff that would be the greenest, we just highlight it at the bottom. we basically repeat that. So we make like a top three of like combos you like, because maybe for some people, especially like if you're colorblind or like if you have like low contrast on your desktop, especially if it's all green, you're going to have a hard time differentiating those.
So if we give your first like top three, that could be, okay, so I like this the most, like these three, yeah. Genres versus, yeah, this would be like common, like in between stuff. Could we do that for like anything else? So.
Ste (31:46.72)
I guess generals vs. moon then generals vs. what else do we have generals vs. moon by count yeah and by rating
Adam (31:57.27)
Yeah.
Adam (32:04.397)
Well, at least put it in here and we can refine it from there. But just to make sure it has some of the high notes. We have some one -off answers. I think of almost like answers to specific questions. Like what book?
Ste (32:07.286)
Yeah.
Adam (32:30.7)
did they read the most times?
Ste (32:34.176)
Yeah.
Adam (32:37.196)
So this is kind of like how we have it now.
Ste (32:42.082)
Yeah.
Adam (32:44.849)
What book did they read the fastest? What book have they referred to the most people to read?
Adam (33:07.894)
And this one's kind of a...
Ste (33:18.338)
Yeah, what else do we have in there?
Adam (33:20.268)
We have like average pages per book and average pages per day.
Ste (33:26.978)
Yeah
Adam (33:33.9)
This is kind of a neat stat, like average number of pages you read a day, like when you look at it over a long period of time.
Ste (33:38.047)
Yeah.
I'm very excited about it. We can extrapolate stats based on that. So you're reading the most on Tuesdays or you haven't been reading as much over last weekend as you did in your whole period on the hardcover. So we could maybe even trigger notifications based on these stats or just highlight them on the stats page. So yeah, average pages per day really.
Adam (33:49.163)
Thank
Ste (34:06.464)
I mean, books, probably got, mean, most people are gonna probably have like one, two per month and like the same one, like one per week. Except Jeff, Jeff is gonna have way more.
Adam (34:21.034)
You
like meta things.
Ste (34:27.328)
yeah, this is like, yeah, like number of like social interactions, kind of like what was your activity, activity stats.
Adam (34:40.82)
Yeah.
Ste (34:43.084)
This would be like really neat for discussions. So discussions you participate again, but yeah, we'll leave that for when we actually get like, we have data on those. Okay, this is so far a pretty good like.
So for a journal, like number of notes over time, would we, number of notes and quotes?
Adam (35:12.105)
Yeah, most popular quote.
Ste (35:15.273)
popular yeah yeah
Adam (35:29.024)
Those seem to be like the main ones.
Ste (35:31.819)
Yeah.
Ste (35:35.616)
entries per book, but that's not like really.
Adam (35:39.796)
most active journal.
Ste (35:43.562)
yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, they don't like... Yeah, it would be nice to have giveaways for the people who have the most active journals.
Adam (35:46.933)
I get it.
Adam (35:55.846)
OK. For else we have like a top for books.
Ste (35:57.13)
Okay, so referrals. Yeah, most preferred book. Yeah.
Ste (36:08.598)
Most preferred readers, yeah.
Adam (36:08.681)
readers.
Adam (36:15.808)
Let's see, how about.
Ste (36:17.308)
And total readers referred, so like how many people signed up on hardcover because of you? Like people shared their referral links.
Adam (36:27.678)
Yeah. And that's, I guess there's two different types of referrals. I'm thinking of this as like the, the one when you click want to read off of someone else's pages and it tracks that that user referred you to that.
Ste (36:37.234)
Okay, not okay. Yeah, maybe that's like a meta stat or a social stat. So yeah, we take it out of here. Yeah
Adam (36:42.408)
Yeah. How about cause cause that one, I also wonder if that should be like a private stat that only, know, about instead of a public stat.
Ste (36:52.746)
Yeah, you're right. Maybe, yeah, maybe private. wouldn't want... Yeah, maybe we wouldn't want to like make that available to anyone. Yeah.
Adam (37:05.706)
Yeah, this is kind of neat when like total books read from your referrals.
Ste (37:10.892)
Mmm, yeah.
Adam (37:13.25)
Total books. How about total books from your
and then there's kind of like red and saved.
Ste (37:31.372)
Yeah, that's cool.
Adam (37:33.821)
let's see.
And I mean, one thing that we can technically do is almost create like a downstream effect of this. Like, you you, you refer someone else to a book and that they refer other people to it. So it's almost like a pyramid scheme with that book at the top and you as the referral. it's like, we could track this as almost like a network effect of like, because you posted something, here's all the people that ended up saving it.
Ste (38:06.218)
Yeah, that would be like, I'm imagining it as one of those graphs, like kind of like a neural net with, you know, the book in the center and people like first degree referrals, second degree referrals. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be really neat.
Adam (38:27.692)
I'll just call it nested referrals as a concept.
Ste (38:32.128)
Yeah.
Adam (38:37.004)
Cool. I guess we have like most, most liked list.
Ste (38:46.668)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (38:50.54)
I mean, there's the option of featured lists. If you manually are able to tag a list with a certain tag and then it shows up on your stats page, you could like.
feature it or something.
Ste (39:04.488)
yeah, kind of like leather box dust with the favorites, like movies and favorites. You could have favorite books. So this would be like a custom stat that everyone can make. This would be like what we talked about with those tags, like last time when you would tag a list and it would become...
like, so if you tag something top 2023, it would show up on your favorite lists. Yeah, here we go.
Adam (39:45.43)
Yeah.
Ste (39:48.97)
Yeah, this is a really neat concept.
Adam (39:49.622)
Yeah.
Ste (39:53.93)
basically gives people lot of flexibility and yeah.
Ste (40:00.972)
I'm curious to see what other stuff people do with it. Yeah, I guess most favorite, but it could also be most whatever else.
Adam (40:06.336)
Mm.
Adam (40:16.761)
One other thing we could do, like Letterbox does this, I use another site called iCheck Movies, which does something kind of like this, where it shows you your completion percentage for some popular lists. So we would have to choose what those lists are, but they would kind of be hard -coded for everyone.
Ste (40:30.739)
Okay.
Ste (40:37.208)
Yeah, that would be neat. Yeah, kind of like reading challenge. But let's say, yeah, it's like the New Yorker top 100 list or some of the like more popular ones we have.
Adam (40:54.358)
Yeah.
Adam (41:01.68)
And I guess we could like decide if these are hand selected by hardcover and selected by the user.
Ste (41:11.488)
Yeah, it would be neat, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to think of what would be like the use case for like, if you select them. So you select a list and basically if you make your own reading challenges, it would make sense. and it would make even more sense if people participated in those challenges. So maybe you can...
Adam (41:13.004)
because we could always default the ones and then they could override them.
Ste (41:41.28)
Yeah, hand select someone else's list. That's how it would work, right? So if someone posts a reading challenge like, let's read certain authors this year, you could participate in that and it would show up in your stats, maybe.
Adam (41:46.607)
and
Adam (42:01.622)
Yeah, the reading challenge part, I'd have to wrap my head around a bit more. Like if it's, if it's like a, of the areas that we've talked about is like for goal goals, being able to have advanced schools where we say like, you know, read X books and then where we qualify what books meet the criteria for that goal. say from an author or from a list. And then we say like, it has to be.
Ste (42:06.092)
Yeah.
Adam (42:30.186)
Any books on this list qualify towards this goal.
Ste (42:33.492)
Yeah, kind of like that. Well, yeah.
Adam (42:35.488)
And if we, but if we did that, we would need the, we would need the list either way. So it would, it would work well for this.
Ste (42:42.08)
Yeah, exactly. I think we can pull that off. yeah, it's like reading challenges, the way they work is kind of fuzzy for everyone that I know did it. So yeah, maybe we can find a way for them to be even more easy to use and participate in. But yeah, we can just leave this here and see if we figure out something.
Adam (43:04.982)
Yeah.
Adam (43:12.746)
Yeah. prompts. Let's see. guess we.
Ste (43:14.486)
And then for what else would be for, yeah. I think basically like all the stuff from lists, right? Most liked.
Adam (43:25.12)
Let's see, because prompts, most people aren't creating prompts. Most people are only answering prompts. most people aren't going to have much in the way of created prompts here.
Ste (43:32.749)
Yeah.
Ste (43:38.476)
Yeah, maybe most like the answer like the answer you added an answer a book and that book got a lot of up votes so that could Count or
Adam (43:49.268)
Yeah
and
I mean, once we have prompt answers that you're able to have a description and then you're able to heart those, which is in some of our prototypes, I think we could show those prompt answers with the text. So it's like most liked prompt answer. And that shows like text of, and that we could show the prompt.
Ste (44:09.095)
Mmm, yeah.
Ste (44:19.788)
Yeah, kind of like, yeah, the reason why you added it.
Adam (44:24.278)
Yeah.
Adam (44:32.714)
Yeah, because that's like, you know, this is, or maybe we just grab a prompt that they've given a reason for that has the most upvotes and then.
Ste (44:41.9)
Yeah, I mean, over that period, yeah, probably like, some, the idea is to incentivize you answering prompts, so.
Ste (44:56.674)
this does it well.
Adam (45:00.201)
Yeah
Ste (45:00.428)
What else could we do for prompts?
Adam (45:09.11)
prompts are, most of them aren't like tied to a time period in the same way that all the other things are like for, for lists, even, some of these won't make sense on like a, monthly basis, or if you change the time period, like percent of top lists, that's only going to be for like the overall stats. Yeah.
Ste (45:13.088)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (45:27.755)
Yeah.
Ste (45:31.36)
Life, yeah. Maybe we can not show them unless you select some options. So just hide the whole component for time periods that wouldn't make sense. Let me see. Let me browse the France page.
Ste (45:54.316)
We could have some stats for people who create prompts. So if you're a supporter and you've created a prompt, maybe we could show some stats for like how many answers your prompt got and how many people participated in it.
Ste (46:13.516)
But that would be just for, yeah, if you can create the prompts. So books, answers, readers.
Adam (46:13.771)
Yeah.
Adam (46:21.194)
Yeah, I like that. mean, even just showing one prompt that they've created, if they have created one, I think that would be pretty huge. Cause if they have created even one that's gotten a lot of engagement, that's something to be celebrated.
Ste (46:28.844)
Yeah.
Ste (46:34.55)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Ste (46:42.22)
could like maybe the quality of the prompts like if you have a prompt for books that weren't like you helped the discovery of less popular books so I don't know how it would work but it would we need to have like to showcase prompts you created that led to answers
books that aren't that popular on hardcover. So you've uncovered some really hidden gems. Because I'm looking at our prompts and some of them have lots of very, very, popular books at the top. But it would be to do it the other way around. Yeah, most of them discovered prompts. Yeah, that would be like...
Adam (47:29.194)
Yeah, like you said, it would be the prompt with the most books that are like, yeah, less read.
Ste (47:37.002)
Less read.
Adam (47:46.412)
Cool.
Ste (47:48.01)
Yeah, I think that's one huge mind map. I think it's, yeah.
Adam (47:55.564)
So I'm yeah, I'm thinking like, you know, like closing my mind or closing my eyes. thinking like, you know, I, I'm as a, as a reader who's has a ton of data in hardcover, I go to the stats page. What is my, my top question that I'm imagining when I'm going to this page?
Ste (48:17.176)
So I guess my hunch is other than the overall numbers, like the quick stats, which would be in the header, I think my contributions and my reading would have absolute priority. The other stuff is nice to have, but I wouldn't be like network stuff and stuff that's not related to my activity is less.
important. maybe, mean, for me, the most important thing would be, am I like in a good place with my reading? I, so number of pages, what's like my activity with books was so I can improve on that. So that would be like maximizing that.
But maybe, I mean, if someone wasn't interested in that, what would it be? Like what would you be most interested in?
Adam (49:12.011)
Yeah.
Adam (49:25.58)
think, well, that made me think about also getting series data. Here are the series that, because I was thinking if I could see what books played the biggest part of my life over this period. I think that could be done by creating.
Ste (49:34.432)
Serious data, yeah.
Ste (49:44.61)
Good.
Yeah.
Adam (49:53.745)
featured list and tagging it for that year as one way to kind of get that book to the top. But then for
for other books, it's almost like treating the top read books. I'm thinking like when you look at the top read books over a period, one way to do it is to just look at the books that have the most ratings. The other one's to look at the books that have the longest page count. But if you grouped page count by series, you would get the ones that those readers spent the most time in as an overall thing. So maybe it's like...
Ste (50:20.461)
Yeah.
Ste (50:26.796)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (50:30.282)
Yeah, this is huge. mean, we could even highlight stats for people who have been like part of a book universe, let's say you're part of the Lord of the Rings series or the Cosmere universe. Maybe we'd want to make people feel like really special because they dedicated so much time to that. yeah, characters.
Adam (50:49.686)
Hmm.
Ste (50:59.946)
Yeah, characters is a great one.
Adam (51:01.782)
Yeah. So we could do like top pages by character. We like, yeah, sum up the number of pages in every book they've read, tagged with the character.
Ste (51:15.296)
Yeah, would something related to journals, mean characters they tagged in some of their journals, would that be, would that lead to a stat? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, let's not put...
Adam (51:29.012)
We don't have the character tagging ability internals yet, but later on I could see that.
Ste (51:37.644)
there yet. So top pages by character, top series. What else could we do with series? I feel like there's like something else that we could throw in there for series.
Adam (51:51.903)
Yeah
Adam (51:55.658)
Mm -mm -mm.
Ste (51:56.888)
percentage of... Maria is also saying the percentage of your library, book zone, that you completed over that time period. Maybe this could be like a stat for books. Like, this year you've gone through 2 % of your owned books and... actually this could be like a good one for a series. Like, how much of a series did you complete?
over a time period. Like, let's say a book has, a series has five books and in 2023 you've read three books. Maybe we'd want to highlight that you've gone through like three out of five books in that series in 2023.
Adam (52:47.947)
Yeah
Ste (52:50.306)
So this would be like, you just show the books. You just show the series, so like it's series completion, I guess.
Adam (52:51.392)
But.
Adam (52:57.428)
That's that one thing that's a struggle in that one is that there are so many series that they're probably have read. Like we could pick out a couple of those series and show them, but there might be dozens or hundreds of series.
Ste (53:06.924)
Yeah.
Ste (53:13.088)
Maybe the ones they, yeah, how could we pick them? So either by rating or by...
Adam (53:23.071)
Like most top series in terms of number of pages, I guess it's top series.
Ste (53:31.03)
Yeah, or time spent reading them. Or, yeah, yeah, yeah. This would be nice. Yeah, this would be nice. mean, yeah, you're right. If you look like the series you've read throughout your life, it would be like a ton of series. Maybe we could have like a Seymour link and just show like one or two series, which they rated like really high or that are the most recent maybe.
Adam (53:34.508)
time spent. These might be the same.
Ste (53:59.734)
But for yearly stats or for monthly stats, so let's say you're really a prolific reader, you've read three out of five books from a series in July. Maybe if you select July, it can show both series. Else, we'd cap it at a certain number of series.
Adam (54:32.212)
Yeah, something like that.
Ste (54:34.667)
Yeah.
Nice. Yeah.
Adam (54:41.356)
Ryo was mentioning about how many books you've read that you own, that you borrowed and that you've read through.
Ste (54:45.868)
Yeah.
So this is like owned completion. Yeah. And for the borrowed, I mean, we don't have stats. This could be like list completion. I mean, I'm thinking like how we could do it with our current setup. So if you have a list of borrowed books that you've borrowed out and you've read like 50 % of those books, maybe we'd want to it as a list stat.
What do you think?
Adam (55:20.616)
Yeah, that could work where we show like percent red of owned list.
Ste (55:29.015)
Yeah.
over that period of time, right? Yeah.
Adam (55:35.488)
Yeah.
Ste (55:44.246)
Yeah. we're at time. Here we go. Yeah. One hour of mind mapping, everyone. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff. mean, I think right now, many, many of the things we already have, but I guess this would help us prioritize the ones that are like really, really important. And maybe we can just like look at this and the next couple of days try to figure out what's...
Adam (55:45.919)
I think this is a good start.
Ste (56:13.994)
like the most yeah out of this list what what would deserve to go like really high up and what would be like less important that we could put on the bottom so
Ste (56:30.238)
and other ideas of how to combine them.
Adam (56:30.817)
Yeah.
Adam (56:36.197)
I'll share this in our Discord too. And maybe we can see like what ideas people have that aren't on here.
Ste (56:40.29)
Perfect, yeah.
Ste (56:45.556)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, and maybe we can like, yeah. Do you think it's worth asking them what's the most like important thing that they would like to see when they go to their stats page? Like what we discussed right now or would that be too much? I'm guessing not like the most important or three important things, like the most important. And let's see if people like agree on that or they have like wild difference like wants.
Adam (56:48.15)
And then we can start.
Ste (57:14.902)
I'm guessing that would be helpful.
Adam (57:15.136)
Yeah, that would, that would be very helpful. Like, yeah, top, like two or three things they want to see. think, I think knowing that would, would help prioritize this a lot because I have a feeling there's not going to be too much differentiation between them. Like I have a feeling the top, the top ones are going to be pretty common. So if we spend the most time on something, it might as well be those top ones.
Ste (57:24.482)
Yeah.
Ste (57:28.322)
Yeah.
Ste (57:36.908)
Yeah.
Ste (57:40.436)
Yeah, that makes sense. makes sense. OK, let's share it in the Discord. And everyone can have their say. And do let us know which stats you'd want to see. We've gone through. So we have an idea, but we want to hear from you. What would you want to see over there? So yeah, Adam will share it. And everyone can comment.
Adam (58:10.636)
Yeah, I'm just posting it now. I'll post it soon as we're done now so I can write up a message. Cool.
Ste (58:13.422)
here we go.
Perfect. Awesome. Well, I think that's that. Yeah, thanks. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Thanks for the comments and see you for the next Hardcover Life. Thank you.
Adam (58:29.163)
Sounds good. Thanks. Bye.
Ste (58:31.404)
Perfect. Bye bye.