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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 (00:01.494)
Hey hey stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:04.044)
Hello, it's good. I'm enjoying a nice London evening. How about you?
Adam (00:11.294)
recovering from a week long vacation. So I'm trying to, you know, get back into the swing of things today. It's kind of my, we traveled back yesterday. So today's like another first day back.
Ste (00:23.32)
nice you were to Lake Tahoe if I remember right
Adam (00:27.27)
Yeah, yeah, me and my wife and I and six friends kind of just rented a big cabin there for a week and just hung out, played some games, went out on the lake, went swimming, explored the area. It was fun.
Ste (00:43.148)
Wow, okay. That sounds like a dream. I mean, how was it? Yeah?
Adam (00:49.686)
It was nice. It was also like 50 to 80 degrees. So it was like, even at the hottest times of the day, if you were in the shade, it was like comfortable because it would be like seventies in the shade. So as long as you weren't like right in the brightest sun, it was a lot better than here where in Salt Lake where it's like a hundred degrees today still. So yeah, it was nice to get away from the city for a little bit.
Ste (01:19.032)
Yeah, jeez, that sounds great. And was the cabin like really remote? Was it like in the middle of the woods or somewhere like that? Or next to the, yeah.
Adam (01:20.91)
Thanks for watching!
Adam (01:26.098)
It was in the woods, but it was still like 10 minutes away from the lake. So we were, we were pretty close by, but we didn't have to worry about anyone really too close to us. I mean, there were still like, it was still a neighborhood. So there was like sporadic houses, but it wasn't like houses right next to each other.
Ste (01:44.62)
Wow, that sounds really good. That's really nice. Yeah, I heard about Lake Tahoe from a lot of American movies. Everybody seemed to be going to Lake Tahoe on vacation. So that's why I got stuck in my head. So I bet it's like really, really nice. I searched for pictures and yeah, it looks amazing. Was it, could you take a like dip in the lake? Is it that kind of lake?
Adam (01:47.07)
Yeah, it was fun.
Adam (02:05.332)
Yeah.
Adam (02:12.55)
Yeah, it's huge. And I guess it's like the closest, like big freshwater lake to, you know, San Francisco, Los Angeles, you know, it's still like a, it's still a drive from those places, but it's a, or like Vegas, cause it's like right on the border with Nevada, um, yeah, the lake itself is massive. Like it took us, it takes two hours to drive around it. So it's, it's pretty big. And, uh, yeah, we took out a boat and.
Um, there are areas we were swimming and it's like, you know, 50 feet down below us and like mostly clear freshwater. Um, so I, you know, tried to see how far down I could dive and about like 20 feet down, I'm like, Nope, Nope. Can't, can't even see anywhere close to the bottom.
Ste (02:57.183)
That's great.
Ste (03:00.904)
Oh God, yeah, that scared me. That's, yeah, very intense. I watched that, yeah, there's that new series on Netflix about it's documentary about an Italian woman who does deep diving without any tank. And this like dives up to, I mean, down to 50 meters or.
Adam (03:08.394)
But yeah, it was fun.
Ste (03:28.78)
more and yeah watching that it felt like it was terrifying. When they got up they were like almost fainting so yeah.
Adam (03:38.102)
Wow, I don't know how people do it. Like my head felt like it was about to explode from being 20 feet down and that's like seven meters. So.
Ste (03:47.668)
Oh wow, that's still, I mean, I wouldn't go down seven meters. I'm a good swimmer. Seven meters seems like a loss. Okay, so lesson learned. Huh?
Adam (03:53.554)
I won't again. Yeah, lesson learned. Stick to six to 10 feet and closer to the surface in that. But it also made me wonder like in those kinds of documentaries where they're doing it in like a pool that's designed to be like really deep for like a really limited area. I wonder how the pressure is different in a setup like that than in a lake or in like an ocean.
Ste (04:04.449)
Yeah.
Adam (04:23.03)
we have pressure coming from like every side versus there. You only have the water that's above you. So I wonder if they're able to do it in those kinds of situations because the pressure isn't overwhelming.
Ste (04:28.98)
Yeah.
Ste (04:33.484)
Yeah, it's gotta be better. It's gotta be better, but this one, the documentary was actually like deep sea diving. So they actually did it in the sea and the ocean. So yeah, there's a rope that they used to pull themselves by. And again, when they go up, they use the rope. But the thing is, it's so extreme that on the last stretch.
they just faint and you can just see them grabbing their rope and then they just go and they have some divers who come in and actually pull them up because they're fainting and that's the another sport I'd want to do. I mean, not even as a hobby, yeah.
Adam (05:12.184)
Yeah, I'm gonna, yeah, I think I'm gonna nope out of that one real fast.
Ste (05:20.028)
Yeah, that's really good. Yeah, I'm really glad it was a nice vacation. It sounds amazing. Yeah, a cabin in the woods. I mean, it's, yeah, what you gonna find as well. So that's cool.
Adam (05:22.871)
Hehehe
Adam (05:29.574)
It was fun. What have you been up to this last week?
Ste (05:36.128)
Well, mostly parenting, you know, getting coffees, making coffees at home. I got one of those espresso machines where I'm making flat whites. I'm mastering the art of like doing those things. I'm not like that good, but I'm getting pretty decent. Yeah. And yeah, hanging out with the baby and yeah, pretty good.
Adam (06:00.693)
For a flat white, is that steamed milk? Or, okay.
Ste (06:04.124)
Yeah, I got one of those semi-pro machines, the little ones, and I got nice coffee, and you just put it in the thing over there. You steam the milk. It's got a milk steamer. And it's... If you nail the coffee and the steam with the proper milk and the proper coffee...
It's okay, but I had to experiment with a lot of different, I think, like five different coffees and grinds and about three types of milk until I got like a decent one. But now it's like almost coffee shop grades flat white. So I'm like saving money. You know, the, the investment cover for my espresso machine is slightly like.
Adam (06:48.686)
Nice.
Ste (06:57.648)
going up I guess or down depending on the curve you're talking about.
Adam (07:04.151)
The per use expense is going way down the more you use it.
Ste (07:07.836)
Yeah, that's it, see? Yeah.
Adam (07:11.062)
That's cool. Yeah. I, I never got to the point where I was able to make good, like steamed milk. Like I was always doing Americanos just like hot water and espresso. That was my, my go-to drink when we had a espresso machine at work, but the steamed milk part was always, always tricky to not burn.
Ste (07:25.71)
Nice.
Ste (07:30.32)
Yeah, yeah, this one is automatic because you just put the little kettle or whatever underneath it and you just leave it and when it's got a temperature sensor, so it stops. But the manual ones are hard to solve. Yeah. Tough machines, lots of variables. I know why coffee people are the way they are.
I met Kaffi before and they always talk about Kaffi. I'm not gonna become one of those people, but I understand, you know, the whole thing of the hobby.
Adam (08:14.726)
Yeah, nowadays we just do French press most days.
Ste (08:19.396)
That works. That's what I did before. Yeah. That's nice.
Adam (08:25.337)
But yeah, when we were flying, we always go through the like Delta lounge at the airport and they have one of those machines that it's just like click a button and get a cappuccino, click a button and get a latte. It's okay. Like it's better than I would make.
Ste (08:36.83)
Nice, is it good?
Okay, okay. Well.
That's good. I mean, yeah, you can go so wrong. Even I went to like good cafes, like the artisan ones. And I don't know, when they put milk that's way too hot in the flat white, I mean, I don't wanna, it's good, but you don't do that. It ruins the whole thing. So if it's decent, then it's good. You can go so wrong with coffee. I didn't think you could go so wrong with coffee, but yeah, you can.
They should write books on this, yeah. I bet they do. Yeah. I love cortados, yeah. That's with less milk, right? Like flat white, yeah. It's still got, uh-huh, but still double shot. I think so, yeah. Yeah, I like cortados as well. I remember like 10 years now, nobody even heard of flat whites.
Adam (09:18.589)
One of my go-to orders is a quartato also.
Yeah, which is.
Think so. It's like equal parts.
Adam (09:34.766)
I think so.
Ste (09:46.652)
And all of a sudden, because of the Australians, I think that's where it came from, right? I guess. That's what I know. That's the story I'm sticking to. Great. And on the hardcover front, what's cooking? Should we give an update to everyone?
Adam (10:06.23)
Yeah, let's see, what have we been working on? Well, last week while I was traveling, kind of the one thing I wanted to work on was how reviews from external sites are loaded into hardcover. And so the way we've been doing it is kind of the, it's kind of a not great way, but it's worked. So for instance, someone imports their review from Goodreads.
or from any other site, it could have an HTML in the review, it could have markdown in the review, or it could just be plain text with like, break lines to indicate paragraphs. So our importer basically has to be able to format any of those types of markdown, HTML or plain text, and show it using just HTML.
the break lines to paragraphs or break lines. We have to use italics, we have to use spoiler tags if they indicated something's a spoiler. And the way we've been doing that is we kind of just send over the raw review that the person created to like the web browser. And then in the web browser, we translate all of that either HTML or Markdown or something else into
this JSON format and then that JSON format, we combine that JSON format into our review. So it's a very like multi-step process and sometimes it doesn't work right. Like formatting might be off. Sometimes, you know, people don't use the hierarchical tags. Like they might wrap an entire multi-paragraph in a italic tag, for instance. And
Sometimes that might be stripped out because, you know, you can't have an I tag wrapping a paragraph tag.
Ste (12:03.268)
Okay.
Ste (12:09.844)
Yeah, I think I've seen a couple of like weirdly formatted reviews and I was wondering what was going on in the background. So that's how they get born.
Adam (12:19.166)
Yeah, same way if sometimes there will be reviews that just have a character that's repeating star, or maybe it's just some other indicator that would be a quote, and maybe it has multiple quotes, because sometimes in one of those conversions, it added a slash quote in front of the quote, and then it duplicated it, and then it ran it through another process, and it duplicated it again.
So now what I've been working on is on the Ruby side, we actually are converting that to that JSON object. So that way when we send it back down to the client to show a review, all we have to do is like, parse it and show it. And it ends up being a lot easier on the front end now, but it's moving all of that logic to convert their reviews into this, it's called the Slate format.
behind the scenes, which is a big JSON tree that has different types of tags, like for paragraphs for italic, bold, spoiler, and we can add our own things in there later. So this comes in as kind of pre-work for discussions where like if someone's working, if someone has a review and they say like at, you know, Brennan Sanderson, we can have that.
Ste (13:35.949)
Nice.
Adam (13:46.79)
indicate a link to that author and we can show that in a different way in the review. Like we could show a little avatar and the person's name, the author's name, like in the review itself.
Ste (13:58.152)
Oh, that's very interesting.
Adam (14:00.342)
So it's kind of preparing us for this slate format that we'll be able to use everywhere across the site for how we structure our discussions.
Ste (14:11.46)
That's very good. Yeah.
Adam (14:14.27)
It's yeah, it's been a, it's been a fun project, but it's, there's so many edge cases for like different reviews that people have imported with different things, like Goodreads even has a structure where you can basically give a markdown block with a book ID and it'll link to that book ID.
Ste (14:38.42)
Okay, that's very.
Adam (14:38.65)
So, so that's like one of the things that we might do later. So what we can do is when we import that, we can see if we have a book with that Goodreads ID in our system and create a link to that book in our system instead.
Ste (14:42.659)
Yeah.
Ste (14:55.34)
That's nice Yeah, I get what you're saying. So basically it's like taking books and showing them The way we did in the prototypes for discussions at first
Adam (14:56.726)
so he could even like match it.
Adam (15:09.01)
Yeah, I think Goodreads uses them as like a hover popover. So like when you hover over that book in a review, it'll show you like a little info window about that book and you can click on it and go to it. But yeah, how we show them is to be determined, but at least we'll be able to create a marker for the book. And then later on we can figure out how to show it.
Ste (15:28.558)
Yeah.
Ste (15:35.36)
Yeah, that's very good. I even sketched some ideas and some like touch on that. We can take a look at those things later if you want to have a glimpse of... It's very nice that we've been both approaching this from the ends that are what we do. So that's...
Adam (15:48.462)
Thanks for watching!
Adam (15:55.851)
Yeah.
Ste (16:00.152)
That's been very, very nice. And I've read that article that you sent. I was thinking that maybe we can use this to actually go through it because there were some really interesting ideas. I mean, if you didn't have any other plans for today's Hardcover Live, we could do that because yeah, the person who wrote it made some really interesting points and...
Adam (16:22.182)
No.
Ste (16:28.916)
I think it would be good to sort of deconstruct or...
Ste (16:36.004)
flesh out some of those points and see how they're pertaining to what we're doing for discussions. I think that would be really interesting. As the first person who I really made a very, very strong case for what we were planning to do, which doesn't usually happen. I mean, usually it's a nice to have, but this was one of the samples.
Adam (16:46.534)
Yeah.
Ste (17:04.976)
of someone really wanting that as the next thing. I can go ahead and share the screen and maybe we can stop on some paragraphs. Maybe, okay.
Adam (17:12.608)
Yeah.
Adam (17:18.502)
Yeah, that sounds good. And, and this is the article. What do we want from the bookish internet by Molly Templeton that was published on tour.com. Yeah. It's a really great article. It was published Thursday, July 27th. So like a four days ago now I, I read this and I immediately read all the comments and shared it on our discord because it, yeah, it was, it was putting into words a lot of like the
Ste (17:25.109)
Yes.
Adam (17:48.142)
problem I feel like we're also trying to solve. Even though this doesn't explicitly give a solution to it, I feel like there's growing interest in this problem of like how do we collaborate and communicate and discuss books on the internet. It's kind of the overarching problem.
Ste (18:07.427)
Yeah.
Yeah, really nicely laid out. So I think one of the points is that not one network, not Twitter or X right now, not Reddit, not Facebook, not anywhere on the internet, is there a place where you can actually have these conversations? There are...
places where they happen, like there's the book convo on Twitter, there's lots of communities on Reddit, there's Facebook groups, but it doesn't happen in a place that's dedicated to books. There are all these millions of readers who've had to adapt these networks to their needs. And I think what's important is that there is a need. And this article really explores the...
I guess nuances behind that need. It starts off with a lot of really harsh but very good review of what Twitter has become. It's very spot on. What do you think of the move, Adam, because everything's happening so fast nowadays. Last time we talked, we were on Twitter. Now we are on Twitter.
x.
Adam (19:40.178)
Yeah. I like how it kind of starts it as like one of the, one of the, there are multiple problems to figure out. And one of the problems is like, where do authors go to talk about their own books? And, you know, is it their own website? Is it a Facebook group that they run? And is it Twitter? And Twitter is like the easiest one for like an author to just kind of be kind of a casual part of the conversation. They can
be as involved or not involved as they want to. But even then, it's not like a deep discussion, like a Reddit AMA, where you're getting focused attention on a topic. It's more of like you're hanging out in the same city, and occasionally you're going to hear them talk about something.
Ste (20:28.78)
Yeah, yeah, really well put. Uh huh. Uh, yeah. For, for authors, it's like so harsh to be a part of this, uh, this place, because not only they have to be like on every single network, they have to share stuff on Instagram, they have to share stuff on Twitter, they have to do all that. I mean, how do you choose like a network to be part of?
Adam (20:55.26)
Thank you.
Ste (20:57.556)
I really like this paragraph where that's the thing that's pointed out that you are in a place where everything else is going on and you just gotta make your own wiggle room in the ton of information that's around there. And this.
Twitter should not be necessary. This, I mean, it hit home. The authors shouldn't have to worry about doing this. I've seen so many authors on Twitter just doing like a ton of like promotion. And of course, you know, it's good for them to do this, but it's very often just like lost in the whole...
Adam (21:31.805)
Yeah.
Ste (21:57.124)
Yeah, flux of things that's going on everywhere.
Adam (22:01.559)
Yeah, it's a completely different skill to be good at marketing than to be a good writer. And I don't envy authors who have to do both.
Ste (22:10.53)
Yes.
Yeah, we know all about that.
Adam (22:16.73)
Yeah, even developing and marketing, I mean, it's two completely different skills. So I, yeah, anything that we can do to help support authors without having them having to have them be marketers. I feel like that's also a success.
Ste (22:33.128)
Yeah, yeah, especially because, you know, we are founders of a startup. So I guess marketing would be like a thing that we just have to do like we're doing now, talking about hardcover. But for authors where it's, I mean, I'm not saying development or design isn't an art form, but for authors, it kind of feels like, you know, you wouldn't need...
you really wouldn't need to do that. I mean, if you were like taking care of your art, your writing, you should just have a place where you'd talk about it, put it out there and it would just happen to like spread because I think it's still a distribution problem. So there are lots of good books, good authors that don't make it in the, you know, on the big.
headlines on social networks or whatever that is because not because they're like bad or it's poor writing or the books are not interesting, but because they simply just don't get into the algorithm. So I guess that maybe relates to how the algorithm works because pushing your book is
Adam (23:46.008)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (23:58.172)
almost always, you know, you do promo, you write positive stuff. It's not generating controversy. If you're saying, I wrote this book about, I don't know, it's a young author story, young adult story about, yeah, a couple somewhere. It's not going to generate the controversy that usually gets pushed up.
in the algorithm on places like Twitter or like Reddit or like Facebook or like everywhere else for that matter. So the discourse, yeah.
Adam (24:36.926)
Yeah, it seems like more often than not, the things that go viral for an author aren't things about their book. It's like just other funny quips that they've said or something else they've posted. And then people learn about them through that. And then they're like, oh, they're also an author. They have a book. So it's almost like you have to be a personality online first in order to get that attention. And then you can promote something.
Ste (24:54.872)
Yeah.
Ste (25:02.144)
Yeah, exactly. That's, of course it works for some authors really well, but I mean, how many does it work for? Is it one in 10? I mean, I'm guessing, there are many authors out there who just like give up or they don't make it to their reader base just because they have this kind of a distribution problem, or maybe they don't even like.
get published or they don't have any means to talk. If I'm on Twitter, how do I find, I'm an author, how do I find people who might actually be interested in what I'm writing? I have no way of seeing who those readers are in the genre that I'm writing. I have...
no way of seeing what they've read before. I have no way of talking to them. It's very much a distribution problem. I guess this is also what the article was about. I like that they mentioned blogs. What do you think about the, were you part of the blogosphere?
Adam (26:16.768)
Yeah, there's
Adam (26:21.451)
Yeah.
Adam (26:29.074)
I feel like I've been blogging since, I think my first blog was in 2000. So I've been blogging under, you know, different subjects, whether it's just writing about my life or like tech or programming or finance for a while. So, but I felt like for me, like that blogging side was always like writing kind of mostly in isolation until I found like...
Ste (26:35.064)
Wow.
Adam (26:57.622)
communities of other bloggers and we kind of banded together. Um, and I, I think some of that happens in the book communities. So like there are a couple good blog sites that allow contributions from multiple people, but then you, then it's kind of similar to posting your review on Goodreads, you're like, you're putting your review on a centralized place. I'd rather have a centralized place be a blog than, you know, a, like a Goodreads. Um,
But I think there's something kind of in between where we're trying to hit, where people can post their review on hardcover, give a canonical link to it, and it becomes kind of a two-way street where we're helping that blog get more views while also people are finding their content on hardcover. I feel like that space of connecting creators that are creating on other parts of the internet.
and elevating their content. I feel like that's one of the things that we can really lean into because I don't think I've seen that on any other site aside from like, you know, like Reddit has links to other sites. So, you know, if your link is very high on Reddit, then you get a lot of attention or hacker news, that kind of sites. So it's like, how can we be that content aggregator in a way that's useful for...
external creators and for our audience as well.
Ste (28:29.804)
Yeah, that's a very, very good point. Being that place is what we're trying to achieve, I guess. There's a very big disconnect between the book bloggers and their blogs and the social network. So if we sort of become a mirror of those blogs,
uh, that would greatly benefit them. I mean, I'm seeing hardcover as a place where you'd, uh, feel safe doing that. Because of course there's, there's that form of risk. If you have thousands of reviews on Goodreads and your profile gets suspended, or if you, uh, if Goodreads for some reason, vanishes, that content is gone. Plus.
Adam (29:17.07)
Thank you.
Ste (29:28.384)
you're basically like they own it, it's on their website. So the actual ownership of the content of the people that readers write, which is very, very valuable. It belongs to the network. It belongs to Amazon. They can do whatever they want with it. They can delete it. I think Federation, I guess that's like a step in that direction because
Adam (29:33.582)
Yeah.
Ste (29:57.42)
you kind of own the content, but that's at this point, I guess, only accessible to technical users. I know Threads has like an intention to move towards that, but let's see if they make it at all. But there is definitely like this need to have some kind of ownership or at least like trust in the...
place you are leaving your reviews on. And I guess most sites, even, there are lots of places right now where you can post book reviews. You can post them on TikTok. You can post video reviews. You can post them on YouTube. You can post them on your book blog, which is on WordPress or whatever. You can post them on, I don't know, Substack. But...
a place where you find all those kinds of reviews. So you go to a book. I think that this is the missing link that would tie it together because there are lots of discussions about a book on 10 subreddits, five Facebook groups, and 10,000 tweets. You'd have to probably be an AI to be able to see all of that content and...
be able to participate in. There's no way you can do that. So this content is getting created. I think being a content creation platform is important. But as important as that, a content referencing platform would be equally useful. And having that book, so you go on a Brandon Sanderson book. You go on Lisbon. And.
you see all of those reviews from TikTok, from people who wrote the review on hardcover, from people who imported it from Goodreads, from people who have a book blog and they put it with a canonical URL. You have YouTube reviews in there. That's like a complete picture and you have that book page. That book page is like the reference to all of these discussions, the thing that ties them together.
Ste (32:22.08)
I guess you don't find that. I think like this article kind of hints towards that. Where was it? Let me see if I can. So yeah, the attention spent to appreciate all of the book blogs. Yeah, that's like something. But yeah, this idea, the star reviews.
Adam (32:44.176)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (32:52.28)
the way the other networks like reference books, the way, you know, tracking is important, but this thing, an ongoing massive sprawling conversation. I guess that's even for the people who don't want it, if they saw it, I think it would be interesting. I think they'd wanna get in that. If they saw a discussion about
Adam (33:05.778)
Yeah.
Ste (33:21.096)
one of their favorite books, length somewhere. I guess that, I think that would be enough for them to create a hardcover account and reply to someone, especially if it's getting, they either like love what someone said or what someone said is getting on their nerves a lot. So, having that, I mean, that's a social media interaction, I guess.
Adam (33:35.452)
and
Ste (33:49.932)
social media favors extreme reactions. So at least this isn't like trolls and the kind of stuff that happens on other networks. It's just about book content. And I think that's interesting. I mean, that's broadening conversation.
Adam (34:10.79)
Yeah, the more I think about what an ongoing massive sprawling conversation looks like, I was trying to bucket it into two different categories with two different types of voting. For instance, in my opinion, there's short form and long form text. So short form text is like
Um, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, and things where kind of your, your predefined to a set number of characters and you don't really have like a title. So it's kind of like it's individual posts about a thing. And then you kind of have forum style where it's like, you have a title and a body, and then you have comments on that. So like Reddit, Hacker News.
Ste (34:54.537)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (35:10.974)
Even Facebook, to an extent. Facebook would probably lean more towards that, even though it's kind of a little bit in the middle, because I don't think most Facebook posts have titles. I think it's just a block of text. And so it's, and then on top of that, you have two different ways of kind of interacting with it as a user. Maybe that's just favoriting, to indicate that you like this, or it's like up-down voting, so that there's like a.
Ste (35:16.082)
you
Ste (35:22.273)
Yeah.
Adam (35:38.646)
dimensionality to it so you can spot kind of the spam in a system that much faster. So when it comes to like how we answer this problem, I feel like one of the first things we're gonna have to figure out is, do we wanna be more forum-like with titles, descriptions and threaded content? Or do we wanna be more short form like Twitter, Instagram with individual posts kind of just replying to each other?
Ste (35:44.937)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (36:09.12)
Yeah, that's a good separation. Well, the first question is, would it be possible to have something in between or would that be a mess? And yeah, the second question would be, if we go for either of these, what would be, I guess, the advantages and the...
the content is consumed, I guess, because I think there's like a generational gap, maybe here as well. Let me just stop sharing this and maybe we can jump into Figma real soon. There's... So to put it like clearly, the teens are favoriting...
like short form content, which is tick tock, which is video content, highly creator led and with a bit of entertainment to it. Like the stuff is dangling posts, like the YouTube reviews and.
Ste (37:29.776)
shores. They have an element of entertainment to them. So it's not just to review, not just like I'm helping you decide I'm recommending this and there is like that entertainment factor and it's short form. So I guess there's that and there are the longer I guess that would be you know people like us who consume
Adam (37:33.294)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (37:57.996)
long form content easier, who can read through three, like, I don't know, 10,000 character review, and they actually like favor that to get a clear image of that book. So I guess there's also, you know, question of, do we go for both? Do we...
Do we allow people to do both? Do we allow people to write a lot? And do we also allow people to write three words on letterbox? I think they have a similar problem. So the most successful reviews are the three word reviews. They're like, I don't know, a movie review and someone says it's crap. And that's the most popular reviews. And someone who's reviewed that movie and referenced like 10 different
Adam (38:48.802)
Hmm.
Ste (38:57.656)
like historical events and talk through like the currents in film that were like, that's like the less, the least popular review. I know some, some people even like hate leather box for, for that reason. I mean not hate, but it annoys them. So yeah. And I guess the controversy factor is at play here because people like short, witty.
very controversial conversations.
Adam (39:34.174)
Yeah. And yeah, it could be like, maybe parts of the site use one type of conversation. Parts of the site use the other. Like, you know, when you're writing your review, you don't need to have a set limit. You don't need to have a title. It's just, it's just a review, but, or when you're updating your progress on a book, you know, you're saying like, Oh, I'm now 50% in here. Some notes like on where I am now, like, Oh, I can't believe this happened. Or like,
I'm really looking forward, I'm really wondering how this is going to end. And that doesn't feel like it needs like a full title, but if you're like. Asking a question about a book and it's like, it's almost like a book club. It's like the start of a book club discussion about like a topic that feels more like a Reddit part. So it's, yeah, it's almost seeming like different parts of the site will have different like, uh, yeah, some of them will be form based. Some of them could be that.
Ste (40:08.536)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (40:16.13)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Adam (40:31.69)
Yeah, it's like, which one do we start with? Do we try to figure out how to include them both in some way?
Ste (40:37.288)
I think there's a way to basically leave it up to people and see what, where it lands, I guess. Let me quickly share what I was working on to...
Ste (41:00.748)
Yeah, get an idea. I think we have the same instincts regarding this. So these are the old layouts that we did a lot of time ago when we were talking about discussions. So these were pretty good for that time because they kind of function like Twitter. Every discussion had like a route.
So if this reply had replies, you could tap on the reply and it would go to, it would become the root reply that would have its own replies and replies to reply. So that's kind of like how the conversation works on Twitter and that's very smart. I think like that sprawling aspect of the conversation is covered.
by the way you can dig into a conversation and go on a thread as deep as you want. So based on this, I was thinking, okay, if we have discussions, is there a way to, yeah, basically what you're talking about, Adam, how can we merge this type of long content? So let's say someone really wants to
go the deep inside topic or a book they're talking about. Finding the Empire and yeah they're talking about this they're not mentioning where they are in the book they're not mentioning they just talk about the book and people reply and they maybe tag other books and author
and someone adds a list, they shared it too, and you can get a little preview of the list over here. Maybe that would work. I was also trying to figure out like this, a post, what type of content does a post have? So this is kind of like, I guess, like that JSON you were talking about, the file.
Ste (43:27.528)
of course, you know, in very like rough, simple, simplified form, but a post could have like written content, it could have like media, it could have tech books, tech users, tech authors and the timestamp. A reply could maybe have all of those, but maybe not media. So we could limit that. I was thinking that, okay, so this is one kind of post, I was trying to think what other kinds of posts people could make. So maybe
it's updates when you're reading something and you mentioned the page you're on and who's replying also mean you can also see the page they're on and you can this is sort of like the day sync book club idea we were talking about you can see that this person is reading this book they're at page 233 and they made the notes
basically at that point. You are reading the same book and you're on page 223. So 10 pages. Yeah, 10 pages.
before that and you wanna just tell them something or let's say you're like further along because you don't wanna see any spoilers, you click, you mentioned that people wanna see spoilers. So maybe you could see this as if it had spoilers, you could just have it blurred and you can reveal it.
But yeah, let's say you're in front and you reply to this person and there, immediately you found someone who's reading the same book and you apply, strike a conversation over here. I experimented with like that thing we were talking about, like, dislike, thumbs up, thumbs down. Then if a post contains media, let's say you upload the picture, you're at the library and you also wanna like,
Ste (45:35.028)
tag the book. So it's either you tag a book and it appears like this or you tag like many books and we could use the lists or like that components that you were working on to like list all the tag books and maybe the replies could try to figure out, you know, if we have hearts that's like...
Adam (45:37.9)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (45:53.856)
Yeah.
Ste (46:03.916)
sort of push up like a comment, sort of like the Reddit karma or if it's like a score like the karma. So yeah, experiment a bit with the layout. And then like someone wants to post a TikTok review and it would mention maybe when they post it, they can select, okay, this is a review. So this is one is a video review and you post the media link.
you would post some texts and you would tag the book and you'd get replies on that. Or this is like just another layout I was playing around. Maybe you can see the book first and then the review. But yeah, I think it's like most of the stuff we cover. So I'm really glad, you know, I think it's sort of like crystallizing in a direction, I guess.
Adam (47:03.75)
Yeah, yeah, I like, yeah, I like a lot of a lot of this for sure. And I think, uh, I think in my mind, I'm trying to figure out like, what is like the user flow that like is leading them to, to post this, like where are they? So they are like, they've been reading this book. They're like, Oh, I really need to talk about this book. So they open up hardcover and they.
Ste (47:28.664)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (47:33.246)
In this case, they could either like go to the book page and like start a new discussion on about that book from there, or it could be from somewhere else. Like they're just creating a general kind of like a tweet, you know, a general post and then tagging it. So it kind of makes me wonder like of those two directions.
Ste (47:39.313)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (47:47.756)
Yes.
Adam (47:56.874)
Like how many people would prefer having like a free, like an open, open world. It's almost like open world exploration versus like guided exploration. It's like, do you just want to give people a place to post and then have. Have it organized based on what people talk about, which is kind of like Twitter, Instagram, Tik TOK, um, or do you give them a home for their content? Like the book page or that's kind of like Reddit.
Ste (48:05.712)
Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah.
Adam (48:26.122)
or something like that where you are guiding people there to start their discussions there.
Ste (48:31.592)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's really good. I think some people might prefer the first other people might prefer the second I guess on higher cover We're seeing both of those types of people. There are people who wouldn't like there are people who Don't find any particular interest in the feed maybe and they're not there for socializing they're there for book tracking, but there are people who like
are there for the social aspect of it, which is really tied to the discovery aspect. So that would be important. I think it should go in both places. So the way I was thinking about it, maybe this is a bit too much, but the fact that we have the feed and we have the book page. I think...
that's an opportunity for us to show these discussions in both places. But I'm wondering what form would it take? Because if I saw a feed like this, it would be great, you know, have people in my network, have things, have discussions pop up, which I recommend it because I read a certain book or I read a certain genre.
So that would really contribute to book discovery. I'm thinking if a book, let's say, let's like simplify it. If for instance, you have this post and you just post it through a general like posting mechanism. You would just like click a button and you would have something like this. I haven't gotten into that, but definitely doable.
you'd have something like this where you'd write a post and you'd tag a book, you'd tag this book. This conversation would appear in the feed, but because this book is tagged, it would also appear on the discussions tab on the book page. So because this person is talking about this book, it would appear there as well.
Ste (50:57.396)
I guess my question is, what happens to these replies? So if someone mentions this book in the replies, would that appear on this book's page? Or can we make it so that only high-level posts, not replies, like appear, so only a post originating that only mentions that book appears on the book page? The rest are discussions.
you know, general ones. Yeah, what do you think about that?
Adam (51:33.274)
Yeah, if it were to appear on like the discussions tab, we could have, um, I'm thinking we would probably want like a title for it too, because at that point, if it were, if it were on that discussions tab, then it would like, if we only showed like the first sentence of it, that might not be a good indicator of like what the post is about. So maybe.
Ste (51:44.567)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (51:56.867)
Yeah.
Adam (52:00.854)
Like I'm, I think I'm leaning towards having titles for, for things, but, but not for every type of post. Maybe it's like, you know, depending on the type of post and to be determined, like if it's a progress update, it doesn't need a title.
Ste (52:14.412)
Yeah, what if it's optional? I mean, I see reviews needing a title. I see like lots of... You could like... Because yeah, what you are talking about that, you know, you need to have like a glimpse of what the review or what the post is about without having to read it. I think I...
Titles were definitely the next screen I was going to explore. A review would highly benefit from a title, or at least an excerpt. So here you would write the short form version, and here you would really dig into the details. I was even thinking you could separate this in multiple posts. So if you have like a...
Adam (52:57.983)
Yeah.
Ste (53:13.076)
really like 10,000 character review, like a ton of text. Maybe you could do like you do on Twitter. You could like split it into tweets. You could talk about like a reply could be a review of a certain chapter or number of chapters. Another reply could be covering other chapters, but yeah, definitely. The question here is,
Adam (53:38.638)
Thank you.
Ste (53:40.268)
Because we want to make it simple for people to do everything through a single flow. So I wouldn't separate a flow for a certain type of posts from a flow for another type of post. I'd do it in the same place from an experience perspective, I guess.
Adam (53:41.71)
Thank you.
Adam (54:09.354)
I could see it almost like if you, if you created a new post from like the book page, it would, it would be this same screen, but it would pre-populate it with certain things. Like it would pre-populate it with like the book you're talking about and things like that. That way it's, it's like, it could still be the same creation screen, but it has like different things pre-filled based on how you got there.
Ste (54:33.808)
Oh yeah, that's great. Yeah, basically have the things that are needed when you are basically on the, let's say you're on the book page for the Final Empire. When you post something from that book page, you would basically get this tagged book and it would be a post that would need a title. Whereas if you were just making a post.
Adam (54:53.697)
Yeah.
Ste (55:03.508)
I was trying to think of what types of things would people talk about, and this is a list we can all update and contribute to. But one of the posts that I think would be pretty neat, and I was going to do a mock-up for each of these.
if you have like a lifestyle post or just like maybe an opinion on an author or a discussion about the book industry so you don't even mention any book.
Adam (55:41.998)
or even like a link to another site with commentary.
Ste (55:48.08)
Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, all of these, I think it should be the, I mean, you would be able, you should be able to do all of these to have that like sprawling conversation because we don't know, you know, what people might post about and that's a good thing.
Ste (56:16.832)
I guess we should allow them to make posts that are without a title, without... They're not titles, they're not book updates. Maybe someone just wants to ask, how is everybody doing? And they want to share that with the network or what's everybody reading? And they would have people mention what they're reading. Or this is a thing that I just remembered and was one of the best.
things that was happening on forums, like user-created stories. So you have these rules where you would continue what the previous reply was saying. So someone would write the paragraph and you would write the next paragraph and you would come up with a generated story at the end. And these stories were so fun.
Adam (57:04.083)
Hmm.
Ste (57:16.18)
I just remember that when I read that article and they mentioned the forum and blog era, that was like one of the best things that happened. Those stories were amazing. So I want to see if these stories, if this stuff like happens. So if you would just write, continue the story and someone was going to the market or whatever, or my dog climbed in a tree or whatever.
and just to harness the creativity which we don't anticipate, I guess.
Adam (57:57.554)
Yeah, give people a place to play and have fun. Be creative.
Ste (58:02.024)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Facilitate that fund. So we're not like mandating. We are allowing things to be like very organized. And, you know, I'm guessing this would be like very hard to implement. So maybe we could MVP it. Maybe we could like only make the first type of posts, maybe something like this, you would only be able to take one book and you'd have a title and you'd have this and start from that.
But yeah, eventually, I think at least in design, we should cover like the whole span of whatever we think could be possible and make it as flexible. So yeah, we allow that creativity for people. Especially now that our app works very well. So I was thinking in places like this, you would maybe even on mobile, you would just tap.
Adam (58:50.743)
Yeah.
Ste (59:00.184)
this and you'd maybe get the book drawer and you could see the book info and like add that book to your want to read and do all the things. Yeah.
Adam (59:17.298)
Yeah. I think our next good step could be, uh, discussing this prototype with users and just getting their take on it. Because if we, uh, like if they see this and they love it, and that's a good indication that we're in, go in the right direction, if they see it and they're like, oh, I really wanted X, then we know like, oh, we're missing something. And then, then we can iterate on that.
Ste (59:41.876)
Yeah, yeah, that's very good. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's perfect. I think once I have a couple of more mock-ups for like these, I think these are like the tough things. So updates, reviews, mixed media reviews, and this kind of stuff. I think this is like the hard stuff, which is pretty much out of the way. So.
Adam (59:47.292)
See you later.
Ste (01:00:11.624)
I can make some fun ones, like just updates.
Adam (01:00:17.03)
What, uh, what I think would be really cool to see is like, uh, a prototype that, that does like, um, from like you, you open the app and it's familiar at that point. And then where you go from there to get to posting a discussion and having one completed. So it's like, it's kind of like the, the user flow of posting your first discussion and what that would look like to see if that kind of matches what people's expectation would be.
Ste (01:00:44.098)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (01:00:47.306)
And then maybe another one of like reading someone else's discussion that they've already created.
Ste (01:00:47.746)
Oh yeah.
Adam (01:00:55.534)
Because sometimes if you just show them something like this, I worry that they're going to be like, okay, where am I? How did I get here?
Ste (01:01:00.328)
Yeah, where do I get? Yeah, definitely. I'm going to put all of these. So this would definitely be on the book page. So under discussions, you would have like all the discussions from that book and that would be like really interesting to see. And maybe that would answer my question like, do replies appear on the book page or yeah, what do we actually like put over there? What's interesting is that on the book page, we'd also be able, sorry.
shifting. I'll try to move like a little bit slower for everybody watching. On the book page you would have, where is it? Oh yeah, the filters and the sorting. So the discussions would be similar. The only thing you'd be able to do over here is like sort them according to whatever criteria we want to use, filter them.
Yeah, and do all that. I think we had like a place where those were active, the filters I'm trying to see where.
Adam (01:02:08.462)
I think is it this one? Yeah. I hit it when I was a, I just...
Ste (01:02:13.696)
Okay, here we go. Yeah. Okay, yeah, this is the one. So you'd be able to do all of these from the book page, but in the feed, it would just be that exciting, sprawling conversation that goes everywhere. That's for people who want to go on the feed, but you could just spend your time.
here or just tracking books and that would be okay. I mean, we have that already. You wouldn't, you just wouldn't access the feed, which some people might do. But if that feed is interesting, I think the most social network versus readers on hardcover, I think if we nail
Adam (01:02:48.759)
Yeah.
Ste (01:03:13.664)
really the people who would say if you ask them, oh no, I'm not interested in that part. If they would see like some really good posts that would make them laugh, would make them like be, I don't know.
Adam (01:03:27.858)
Yeah. I think my biggest worry with discussions is that we go the route of like, we go too much on the Twitter threads blue sky route, where it's like lots of little posts as opposed to like meaningful posts and how we encourage like meaningful discussion about the book. Like this post right here, that's the mock-up. That's the kind of...
like the content that I want to see people doing. It's like ones that's important to them. It's not just, they're not posting because they want attention. They're posting because they want to discuss the book. And how we get people to do that, how we get people to want to engage around the book and not for their own personal social clout. I feel like that's kind of an important solution we have to figure out, which I feel like, you know,
Ste (01:04:07.906)
Yeah.
Ste (01:04:20.119)
Yeah.
Adam (01:04:25.89)
threads and Instagram or threads and blue sky haven't figured out. It's really just, it feels like just posting for attention right now.
Ste (01:04:31.448)
Yeah, yeah, I guess, you know, I think why many people would want something about books and, you know, the author of that article, for example, is because you'd have that reference point. So, you would be talking about a book.
You wouldn't be if you're on a social network. I mean you're only gonna talk about yourself and Things that are related to you, but here it's about books. It's about that book. It's about yeah, like you said meaningful Discussions, so I'm guessing also the way we roll these outs so at first You know we could have only this type of post
possible so that we encourage and sort of like seed the discussions with like meaningful contributions and then depending on where this goes maybe we get into I was even thinking that media content would only be able to be a feature that is available to supporters so like this is the minimize support supporters badge and that's only people who like want to
build the following and post meaningful updates via video or like meaningful imagery and that kind of stuff. But our supporters are allowed to post that. So I guess it's like also a problem of not all us deciding what posts to allow and when. I mean, this could be like the final vision for the whole thing.
that would allow someone to, but you are totally right that we need the right kind of content, especially at first. So yeah, maybe we can see the twits. Yeah.
Adam (01:06:32.606)
I, uh, maybe, uh, like, uh, tomorrow I'm sending out the, like the newsletter for the month for like August, maybe in a section for there, I can have people sign up for, um, time with me to do, for, for me to interview people about discussions and I can like start showing them some of these prototypes, just kind of really digging into what they want. Um, just kind of just increase our number of people we've heard from about discussions and
Ste (01:06:51.15)
Yeah.
Ste (01:06:56.574)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (01:07:02.09)
really try to dig into what problem they want solved by discussions and then just make sure we're really hammering that.
Ste (01:07:08.658)
Oh yeah, definitely.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, it should cover the things people expect. I'm also thinking, you know.
Ste (01:07:26.328)
being as diverse as possible in that research, meaning getting all kinds of readers. But once I, I think I'll finish up the mock-ups by tomorrow and yeah, people can sign up, sign up people and yeah, let's talk about these. It's gonna be like all the social networks right now are broken. If you manage to make one that's actually
Adam (01:07:30.731)
Yeah.
Adam (01:07:44.494)
Thanks for watching!
Ste (01:07:56.108)
nice to use and is not focused on vanity like threads or on crypto talk like blue sky or on whatever but actually focused on books. There's like millions of people who would be in that target audience. So yeah, I'm pretty excited about the possibilities of discussions.
Adam (01:08:15.018)
Yeah.
Adam (01:08:19.442)
Yeah, yeah, I feel like there's so many like book related things that we can have discussions about to kind of like your list says, you know, there's the book, the author, there's the genre, there's the characters in the book, that there's just links to other sites, kind of like, you know, Reddit for books, but even under that category, there's
Ste (01:08:31.319)
Yeah.
Adam (01:08:46.026)
links to reviews versus links to articles about the book industry. So it's like, there's a lot of just like things people talk about. And we're trying to organize that into a way that people want to talk about each of them. But it also means figuring out which ones people want to talk about most. Like of all of those things, like what's the number one thing people want to talk about. And it might be, it might be links to other sites. It might be, um, the book that they're currently reading. They want to talk about with.
Ste (01:09:00.268)
Yeah.
Adam (01:09:15.106)
with other people, it might be something else. It might be author updates from authors, but yeah, it's, or understanding and prioritizing all those things that people wanna talk about and figuring it out, but it's a fun problem.
Ste (01:09:30.12)
Yeah, it's a really fun problem. And I think the way we structured everything kind of like builds, makes our job not easy because nothing about hardcover has been easy as we found out. But I think it's solvable. And it's solvable without if we're gathering all this Intel, all this info and systemizing it in a way.
can find a way to easily account for all of those little possibilities. There are a lot of possibilities. All those possibilities, that myriad of possibilities, and make it so that you have a central point of reference, like the book page, which is like, and actually that mesh, so it's a book page, authors.
readers, all of that. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that's enough. We got excited over there. Yeah.
Adam (01:10:31.906)
That'll be fun. So it's a good stopping point. I'll work on that discussion guide and probably I'll probably send out the email for people to sign up for time with me starting next week. If you think that's enough time to have like a good, be in a good place for prototype.
Ste (01:10:52.592)
Oh yeah, it's gonna be done by tomorrow or Wednesday. Let's see, yeah.
Adam (01:10:58.702)
Cool. I'll start my count, I'll start allowing people to sign up for time with me on Monday. And I'll invite you to any of those meetings. That way, if you want to join, watch, ask questions, any part of it.
Ste (01:11:09.836)
Yeah. Shadow.
Ste (01:11:15.14)
Perfect. That sounds great. Wow. This was a fun chat. Yeah. Great.
Adam (01:11:17.426)
Sweet. Yeah. Well, I will talk to you next week and I look forward to talking to some other people about this. We've been talking about this so much with just ourselves. I'm always wondering, once we start actually talking about it with other people and showing them what parts they get excited about it and then that sparks even more excitement.
Ste (01:11:39.681)
Yeah.
Yeah, that sounds good. Great. Well, see you later everybody. See you next week.
Adam (01:11:45.134)
Cool. See you next week. Bye.