To clarify on the magic link, you only have to do that the first time. The authentication in the backend remembers you when you go back to the site, automatically logging you in. Ideally you'll only have to check your email once.
This is assuming you're always on the same device, don't clear cookies, don't use multiple browsers/profiles, don't mask your browsing in other ways, don't use rotating/temporary emails, etc. I logged in three times today and needed a magic link each time. My password manager would have autocompleted correctly in any of those situations... were there a password field to use.
I've gone weeks not logging into services like Slack before just to avoid dealing with trying to get into associated email accounts. Magic links are one of my least favorite "convenience" paradigms to emerge over the past couple years: they're less efficient, less secure, and more annoying/confusing friction for many users, and reinforce a reliance on email at a time when many people are trying to wean off it.
The email you're referring to is just the single "magic link" email to get you signed in for the first time, which is how Slack and other "magic link" sign-in processes do it too.
You can reply to every other email you receive from booqsi and someone from the team will see it and get back to you. Or, you can reach out directly to contact@booqsi.com or feedback@booqsi.com.
We're pulling all of our book data from the Google Books API, so Booqsi itself doesn't store any of that data. As for reaching out, feel free to email contact@booqsi.com.
Thanks for the feedback! The book's info page doesn't have a lot going on, except to see some info about the book (or add it to a shelf, or recommend it to a friend) and see if any of your friends have read it.
Your comments about Goodreads and the average random person's opinion is spot on and one of the inspirations for wanting to build something new. I noticed that its my actual friends and family -- not necessarily a random person -- that have the biggest impact on what I read next. A book rec from a friend you respect goes a long way. Booqsi is attempting to harness some of that.
I agree, reading by nature is very personal. Have you tried reading when you're surrounded by a group of friends talking? Yeah, hard to do. Doesn't really work.
But, where I've found the "social" element being important is more in helping me to determine what to read next (like a friend recommending a book to me), discussing books with others or sharing something interesting about what I'm reading, seeing what my friend's of family's all-time favorites are, etc.
The interaction comes in-between reading sessions and has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of books.
Love this idea. Gamification of reading is something people have dabbled with for awhile; would be great to eventually build in something like you mentioned.
Definitely. On the roadmap, with Google as one of the first we're rolling out. Not only does it reduce the barrier to sign up, it also helps you discover (or invite) friends.
The goal isn't to be another reviews or ratings site; that's been done before. The goal is to leverage the power of your personal book community to help you better decide what to read next. Drop book recommendations to each other, post about books to your feed and engage in discussion, see what your friend's favorites are by viewing their top 10 favorites shelf, etc.
Are you purposely trying to be in bad faith? It's fine to give ideas and suggestions, but you are being VERY antagonistic. They are using Heroku FFS, this isn't a "shady" service because of that.
You are very trusting of random people on the internet.
There is no evidence to support the claims this person makes that it's not a part of Amazon itself. (I don't believe it it is a part of Amazon either, btw) It's a huge en devour to make a social network and it's got a slick interface and design.
My gut says this is not a one man show (he says "we" alot), they have _legal_ pages on their site (evidence of their priorities?), but no details on who they actually are on their about page, (lowers my trust factor by a lot) unlike a lot of other projects around here.
So, there is more evidence to support skepticism than there is to support carelessly believing some marketing blurb.
Yeah, we're using Heroku, which host all of their own services on Amazon's EC2 (meh), which was an unfortunately short-sighted tech decision early on that we're looking to remedy. We're hoping to transition to Azure or Google Cloud. Any recommendations?
I'm a happy fly.io customer. For small projects (i.e. you don't need 100 servers), I find them to be way better than any of the enterprise-focused players. They're like Heroku if Heroku had continued innovating.
You can quite reasonably want to be independent of Amazon-the-online-retailer while being agnostic about cloud service providers. Speaking personally, I very much want local bookstores in my neighbourhood, but do not care whether there is a cloud data centre in my city or province, or which one it is.
1). Persistent design choice, as its built to be primarily a social platform. We felt like an account with your name was bare minimum for something like this to function correctly.
2). No GIFs. But, noted that GIFs could be a fun add.
If you add gifs, please allow an option to turn them off. That's one of my biggest pet peeves about Goodreads, a lot of reviewers put a gif after every sentence or two and it drives me up a wall. I want to read a review, not watch a series of tangentially-related short video snippets.
