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Beta Testers required for my book-recommendation website (bookclub.ai)
29 points by aditiyadav on Jan 31, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 64 comments


Broken on Firefox (v 109, on macOS Ventura) with NoScript -- keeps refreshing too fast to tell NoScript to temporarily allow scripts from some of the sources. Keeps refreshing continuously if I disable all restrictions on that tab.

I couldn't get far enough with it to even see the complete loaded UI.


Even without NoScript it's rapidly reloading.


Looking at the code, it looks like they are not logging into MongoDB/Realm async, they are just checking if it is done, then reloading the page if not.

    const user = app.logIn(credentials);

    export const client = num_users===0 ?  
    // wait for 1 second before reloading the page
    setTimeout(() => {
      window.location.reload();
    }, 350) : app.currentUser.mongoClient("mongodb-atlas")
(which coincides with loads of realm users in localstorage if it continues to reload)

This https://www.mongodb.com/docs/realm/web/authenticate/ shows how to login whilst waiting for a user to be created.

Edit: @aditiyadav Hope that doesn't come across wrong, just pointing out where the problem could be :)


@bennyp101 Thanks a lot for your feedback! I am grateful for you spending time on my website and pointing out the problem along with the possible solution :) Really appreciate it. Fixing on it now.


This really helped me @bennyp101, Hopefully the issue is resolved now.


Thanks a lot for the feedbacks, Have been heads-down here and now its loading without any glitch. WIP on making it responsive across screens and improving ML models to understand natural language queries.

Much appreciated!


Utter waste of time to get anything working with noscript. That's pandering to a niche of a niche.


When technical niche users tell you about a problem, you almost certainly have that problem.

When general users tell you about a problem, 80% of the time it's not that problem.


Thanks folks for pointing out the issues. Have been heads-down here and now its loading without any glitch. WIP on making it responsive across screens and improving ML models to understand natural language queries. Much appreciated!


I am looking for beta testers for my newly launched book-recommendation website - bookclub.ai

I have build an AI book-recommendation website this month & have 30k books in my database right now.

Bookclub.ai has based on genres, celebrity recommendations, popular lists and series.

I have applied AI to present a visual representation of "Books More like this" in the form of mind-map feature.

One of the best features is "Book-Genie" which recommends books real time based on your mood.

I am a sole member of this project right now and in bootstrap phase. Would love for you to checkout my website and any feedbacks/collaborations are welcomed.

Happy reading!

Link - bookclub.ai

My Email id (for feedbacks/collaborations) - 19aditiyadav@gmail.com


I'm interested in how large you think the database might grow? One of the biggest benefits I can see in a site like this is the possibility of discovering 'hidden gems' that aren't well know and thus hard to find, but of course you'll only find what's in the database.

I'm working on different product that involves processing book content, and trying to plan for the computational requirements of millions of books and it's a lot, but I'm guessing running an language model over them would be several magnitudes more demanding.

Good luck, seems like a really promising use of AI!


I am planning to increase my catalogue to 1Mn. books as I get more users on the website.

Running a language model is challenging as it took ~22 hours for training on 30k books and I expect it to take at least a week on M1 GPU.

On Size, I expect 10Mn books to be taking ~16GB storage in my database.

Thanks for your comments and good luck to your data pipeline.


That's actually not too bad, I would have guessed a lot more than that. Good luck!


Thanks for sharing your project. Can you speak a little about what kind of AI you are using?


Thanks for your comments, Allow me to redirect you to https://medium.com/@19aditiyadav/how-i-built-bookclub-ai-ai-...


Great idea.

Initial feedback is that the UI on the webpage seems busted, or at the very least poorly-scaled. For example the "Celebrity Picks" photos are way too large and pixellated, and the "Recommended Lists" title text is hard to read against the background of Hillary Clinton's red jacket.

The UI also seems a bit too busy - hard to know where one should start the moment they land on the page. Particularly that it is recommending me a bunch of genres and celebrity picks before I've even given your model an indication of what I want. It'd be a lot more user friendly to either start with a simple explanation of "how it works" followed by a "start here" button, or simply ask the user for the last 3 books they read and then SHOW how it works by providing actual recommendations.

As someone who reads a bit (and who has a librarian partner who reads a tonne), this sort of app NEEDS integration with goodreads. We both maintain lists of what we've read, and what we want to read, on goodreads. If it was possible to just paste a link to my profile (i.e. give you the goodreads user id) and the page would say "of the books on your want to read list, you should read X next", or "why is Y on your to read-list? you wont like it", or even, "your 'want to read' list is missing Z!", I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

You could even scrape ratings from goodreads profiles to better train your model. I already rate books there (out of 5), so there is already more sentiment data there than you'd get by asking me to just list books as "like/hate".

As far as how book-genie operates, I put in "Sci-fi dogs" and it failed to recommend 'City' by Simak, but rather gave me a bunch of titles with 'Dog' in the title that aren't even sci-fi. To me this isn't really a good output, and tells me that your algorithm is quite shallow and isn't really recommending based on actual content.

Hope you keep going, as this is definitely a hole!


Goodreads is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Maybe consider ebook-platform-agnostic sources of book data?

(I'm trying to get off Amazon completely. Tight Goodreads integration is therefore a nope for me.)


StoryGraph (https://app.thestorygraph.com/) is the most viable non-Amazon book reading community at the moment.


Try shepherd.com when you get a chance. More aimed a book discovery then social though.


These are some great feedbacks and I will respond here in a couple of weeks.

Key Action items: 1. Provide a sneak-peek to product(UX) 2. Integrate with goodreads or at minimum allow someone to enter their book list 3. Allow creating list from users and recommend NextUp accordingly 4. Improve Book-Genie, Have some plans to train the ML model on Reddit data

Really grateful here!


Not sure how the first set of "recommended genres" are chosen - for example, "suspense" seems incredibly narrow, and similarly "speculative fiction" to include scifi/fantasy/horror is usually used rather than simply doing horror. Also why "autobiography" rather than "nonfiction"?

I also looked at your "genres" page. It's very weird that the lists don't match the bar at the top; are these things not generated from the same source? e.g. the bar starts with romance, fantasy; but the first categories are fantasy, magic. (also what is the difference between fantasy & magic)

Is there a way to add books you've already read & enjoyed to get similar recs? This is how Storygraph operates, and I've heard fantastic things about their recommendation engine, although tbh my TBR list is quite long enough and I honestly have no need for a product like this.

quick edit - also, the text of "Jurassic Park" seems to be in Spanish, while everything else is in English. Some i18n issue?


Thanks for your feedbacks, Much appreciated.

<<Genre Page>> Actually the "Bar" at the top is clickable and opens up set of carousels in below pane, e.g clicking on "Technology" will show carousels for "Programming","Technical" and "Computers". I plan to automate this process and personalize it based on user history.

<<Is there a way to add books you've already read & enjoyed to get similar recs?>> Yes, definite plans there and will pick it up after Book-Genie, Making the page responsive and improving search.

<<Jurassic Park>>- Yes, I need to add language detection filter.

Really thankful here and hopeful that this becomes a useful product for you in future.


There's a continuous reload loop on Android Chrome.


Same of Firefox (Linux)


And FF Windows.


And FF MacOS.


And Safari


And brave (android)


And FF Android


And Edge - Xbox Series X


There's a continuous reload loop on Android Chrome.


Thanks a lot for the feedbacks, Have been heads-down here and now its loading without any glitch. WIP on making it responsive across screens and improving ML models to understand natural language queries. Much appreciated!


FWIW, the loop doesn't seem to be continuous, eventually the page loads. Not sure if relevant, but I switched focus away from the tab during loading.


The site does not seem to work well with Firefox (v109 tried on Win10 and Linux-based).

Keeps continuously refreshing. Please fix.


Don’t work on the latest safari for iOS too keep refreshing


Same on Android Firefox too


The website is caught in a perma-reload loop for me (Firefox, macOS).


Thanks a lot for the feedbacks, Have been heads-down here and now its loading without any glitch.


Interesting, I like that clicking on Thinking, Fast and Slow recommends Barry Schwartz and Judgment under Uncertainty. Still though, I would probably just stick with "Customers who viewed this item also viewed" on Amazon as it feels like wider recommendations are in that group than what the algorithm is recommending here.

What I really want with any recommendation system is more control with how wide or narrow the net is cast. Some genres/subjects I have completely over fished and need a really wide net. Something like Russian literature though you could just recommend me Dostoevsky because I don't know much of anything about the subject.


I asked it for "hard space sci-fi", and it gave me a book about space (not sci-fi), a book about mental illness set in the ocean (I think? It was hard to tell), Congo by Michael Crichton (not space), and one book that might have been hard space sci-fi.

Edit: I asked it again, and got: a book about space, another kind of book about space (spacetime and geometry), a sci-fi book that definitely wasn't "hard" sci-fi by my definition, and a "Cat in the Hat" book about space. Certainly amusing!


The Model is Naive currently and picks on keywords and its synonyms. I have plans to include Reddit data to retrain the models.

Have touched upon approach here- https://medium.com/@19aditiyadav/how-i-built-bookclub-ai-ai-...

Thanks for your feedbacks and these queries X Results would definitely act as sniff test going forward.


The carousel that says "Meet Ady our Book Genie" moves too fast. It scrolled before I could finish reading it. I tried scrolling back but it kept auto-scrolling before I could read about Ady


@spencerchubb - Thanks for pointing that out. I just fixed it :)


The "Hall Of Fame-Authors" widget seems slightly broken. I'm assuming that most of the novels are supposed to be hyperlinked, but for me only one book is linked, and it goes to a different book. Vonnegut links to:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18078737.Odds_On


Great callout, Give me time till this Friday and you should see it corrected.

Happy Reading!


Are the genres assigned by the AI, or manually or you are using the data from another site (Wikipedia, Amazon, ...)?

Is the AI used to choose the recommendations or only for the graphic?

> recommends books real time based on your mood.

How can the website detect my mood???


If you go to 'Book-Genie' page, you can tell whatever you are in a mood for, and it will recommend you books.

You can check out my blog, it will answer all your questions -

https://medium.com/@19aditiyadav/how-i-built-bookclub-ai-ai-...


Did not get any logical results for "hard science fiction" "books like A Town Called Alice" and a search on "The Lightning Conductor" (sold 2 million copies in its first edition in the US) returned books on lightning and electricity.


Latest Chrome on macos Monterrey seems to be working, but the output to a query like "I like book <the name of a book> by <full name of author>" ends up with four empty boxes within which there are yellow rectangles with the text "Book Info".


Hi, Its a naive model currently and probably not understanding full context. As I am retraining the model on Reddit data, may I suggest to go to Detail page or MindMap for recommendations.

I understand its buggy currently and I am actively working to resolve these blank results issues.


I thinks is interesting an algorithm that helps you go outside of your bubble. Given a book I am reading suggest me another book from another category which could interested me.

Instead at the moment most of recommendation engine keeps recommending book in the same niche.


I tried "well-written fiction" and got back four non-fiction books about writing.

"intelligent fiction" - four non-fiction books.

"fiction by women" - two memoirs, two non-fiction....

So then I just tried "fiction" - guess what, four non-fiction books...


I'm unable to view the website in the Lynx browser - it's just an intro blurb.


I would spend some time focusing on search fundamentals. When I search ”James Ellroy” only one of four hits is a James Ellroy book. If I can’t even find what I like, how can you recommend similar stuff?


I'm guessing it is a lack of data - when I search for a book I'm currently reading (The Discovery of Slowness), there are no results.


"Books with good magic systems"

- Recommendations for books on crystals and healing

"Books like Name of the Wind"

- Recommends "Name of the Wind" and "Wind in the Willows"

I think this might not be right for my use case.


Thanks for making this, I'm always looking for good book recommendations. Looking forward to trying it out!


I’d really like “Books similar to XYZ” feature. Trying it in the Book-Genie just gives me the book I put in.


It definitely still needs some work on design details.

Also on Firefox it keeps reloading the page.


The idea is interesting. However I'm afraid the current state of the site would benefit a lot more from some dedicated testing (i.e. one or two people, putting time and effort) rather than a bunch of strangers looking at it casually.

I understand you're the sole developer of the project and that you need to get help in any way you can.

But there are some really basic problems.

Many have already commented about the continuous reload thing. It can be fixed, apparently, by closing the tab and reopening. Apparently. That's what I did and it worked. But it's a big enough problem that needs a deeper look. That's why someone specifically trained to test would help you much better.

There seem to also be a bunch of bad-loading problems. Sometimes stuff doesn't load. This is so bad that you even have a message asking the user to reload or re-type the query until it works. Yes, I understand about the money restrictions, but throwing that against a whole community will hardly be productive.

I mentioned "bad-loading" and not simply not loading because sometimes the wrong cover loads for a certain book in the results and you hover over it and it's a different book, click it, and it gets the correct cover.

Again, I understand that you want help and are alone. But these problems are big enough to be showstoppers. In the sense that it will be much harder to get anyone interested if thing don't even load correctly or at all, or reload infinitely.

Now...

The mind-map seems like a nice feature. But it lacks links between the bubbles (at least in my browser) which feels weird. It makes it look more like a bunch of bubbles randomly thrown in there than an actual mind-map with a structure or relationship between nodes.

Also, it frequently features duplication. Just use the given example of The Great Gatsby and you'll get a second "The Great Gatsby" bubble as if it was a different book. I tried randomly "Neuromancer" and there were 2 extra Neuromancer bubbles. It doesn't look like they are duplicate entries in the dB but more like a problem building the mind-map.

I also get some random bubbles missing their title.

As for the "Book-genie" recommendations I can say very little. I tried the "Inspiring books with aliens" example and I got "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" along Cixin Liu. Are these results good? I really can't say, but I don't feel like a physics book matches the mood. But in any case, one would have to test this much more deeply to actually evaluate if the recommendations are any good, or even simply any better than a keyword based search.

There's also more general design and UX comments that I could say. But again these are hardly specific details. It feels like you'd need someone to dedicate some time exclusively to that part and re-do things in general.

----

In any case, I do hope you get the help you need to make this work. I just don't think putting this up in its current state against a large audience will do much good.


@genezeta - Thanks a lot for this detailed feedback. I am really grateful that you actually took out time and energy to check out all the features and then pointed out the fixes required. I agree with you on every single point and will be working on fixing each and every problem you raised


Site reloading continuosly.


No recommendations for "Trump MAGA 2020"? - Disappointed.


No recommendations for "Trump 2020 - MAGA"? - Disappointed.




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