Critical feedback from a potential fan:
#1 - When looking at best sellers, one of the first things I saw was, "A Dance With Dragons, 29 critic reviews | Published: August 28, 2012" - The "Published" date is obviously for something different than the book (Softcover? Trade Press?) - regardless, for book reviews what's most important is not the publication of the format (I can get that at Amazon in 2 seconds) - but the publication of the _content_
#2 - I wanted to see how Peter Hamilton's books were reviewed (very popular author, so lots of reviews of his work out there), so I typed, "Peter Hamilton" and got 17 hits, but not a single one for Peter Hamilton's books. Typing the same thing in Amazon.com, despite how common the name is, got me a page of hits comprising _only_ the Science Fiction author Peter Hamilton.
In general, it's better to focus on the 99% of what users are looking for than the long tail. Not sure if you just don't have all of the reviews entered here, but the content needs bulking up before you introduce this to the general populace.
Love the idea - I'll check in from month to month to see how it comes along.
I'm searching for "Count of Monte Cristo" (no quotes), and I get barely-related results (starting from "The Pregnancy Countdown" to "Fifty Shades of Grey" - please tell me that "of" is a stop-word in your search algorithm!).
Sidebar: Is your review aggregation automated or curated?
EDIT
When a cover image is not available, the results are meaningless as you must hover over each coverless result to see the title. I think the text should be always visible for images with no cover:
On top of the search algorithm being a little wonky, I think your sentiment analysis is a little off, as well. For example, for the book Caine's Law by Matthew Stover, you have the Two Pens and Kirkus reviews as negative, when in fact they were positive reviews.
I would love to see a site like this work--I'd be a constant user, but it's got some work to go before it's usable.
[1]: http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/search?q=%22end+of+eternity%...
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=end%20of%20eternity
One other point, I don't think the disparity between positive and negative cloud icons is big enough. On Rotten Tomatoes it's crystal clear.
Love the site concept. Have been looking for a site like this for ages. Looking forward to seeing it grow.
The easiest way to fix this is remove the bold declaration from your CSS. The text will still be bold, because you are using a bold font.
The other way to fix it is to go into your @font-face declarations for droid sans bold, and change the declared font-weight to be bold. This tells the browser that the font is already bold, and not to make it more bold.
Here's a before and after in FF (latest) on OS X. Faux bold: http://cl.ly/image/3R0B0z1s0A3g. Real bold: http://cl.ly/image/2A1N3w083h47.
Actually, being able to see all books by the author would be especially useful. And it's a view more particularly essential than it is for RT (since an author has a more singularly important role in the quality of a work, compared to the actors/studios/directors/writers/producers/financial backing that go behind a successful movie)...being able to see an average for an author's books, or even a sparkline (to see if he/she is going downhill) would add a lot of value with minimal effort.
Related to that: I know it's kind of important to people to see the blurb, which necessitates a multi-column layout for the listed reviews. But I'd rather see it in a tabular format, with Reviewer Name, Date, Rating, and then a long field for 20-30 word blurb. It's easier to see distribution of reviews in a tabular format.
Also if you search for something like "The X of Y" you'd get results that had nothing but the "the" or "of" in common. :(
http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/19-Moonwalking-With-Einstein reckons that the NYTimes review is negative, but reading it (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-m...) it appears to be positive? How do you work out which are positive and negative?
Also, could you make it possible to blacklist certain reviewers? Is that what the thumbs up and down do, personalising your result? Say, if I went to the review page of 50 shades, and downvoted all the positive reviews, will those reviewers stop counting?
If 7 out of 10 critic reviews are positive, the rating is 70%. We recommend a book if it scores over 70%. More info here: http://idreambooks.com/toread_or_nottoread
Thumbs up/down doesn't personalize yet...
So I tried some current best seller type stuff. No Stephenie Meyer, no Suzanne Collins, no Charlaine Harris. Finally found some Stieg Larsson.
The blue headlines and grey text are hard to read. The little cloud thingie seems odd. Other than that, I like the site. I clicked on links, got the review, from the original site. More content and I'd probably be a user.
I'm curious how you determine whether a given review is positive or negative, did you use something like http://nltk.org/ ?
It took me a couple of minutes looking over the homepage to realize that it was organized by genre. I'd recommend making those columns more visually distinct, so you don't offend snobs like myself.
To address patja's concerns - it looks like you've got some young adult fantasy/scifi mixed in with normal fantasy/scifi. Separate those out, and you'll likely get a better response from fans of the genre.
Also - this looks quite exciting. It's amazing how few effective tools there are out there for finding my next book. Thanks for making another!
Maybe there just aren't enough book critics, or you're not aggregating them all, or you aren't selecting for the top critics like rottentomatoes.
The reviews are below the fold on my 1050px height. I wondered what was so special about the site before randomly scrolling.
The justified text with the font for the description is hard to read and ugly.
Encoding issues in http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/140-Drift ? Lots of issues on other entries too. Did you scrape other sites for this, not using a legal and well-formed source...?
Thumb-up/-down icons are pretty much not disginguishable for me. Looked like rotated stars on first glance.
The "overall rating" is not intuitive, I only noticed it when I checked what else was on the page. Rottentomatoes is not better for either though, I always have to think what they might mean before I get it (the symbols).
I kept looking for the Amazon link to check the pricing and other relevant metadata.
OP, also check out Amazon's affiliate program.
The clouds on this website aren't bad, but I didn't even realize they were there for a few minutes while I looked over the book covers. They blended into the background and didn't instantly provide a positive or negative connotation.
Since the site's name is 'I Dream Books', perhaps a nice fluffy pillow represents a good book. Or a dream bubble with a happy face. Perhaps the badly reviewed books get a dream bubble that's bursting, or has a nightmare inside.
That being said I don't love the cloud icons. Also the layout of the social media icons when viewing a book is ugly.
I predict tremendous success.
Love the aesthetics.
Can you make the slider (move me) and the category names (bestsellers, recent-in-fiction etc..) a fixed/floating bar on the page? As I scroll below / load more to view more books, I sometimes forget what category I am looking at and if I need to switch to another one.
Two minor comments:
1) Sometimes the same book shows up in different columns (e.g. Bestsellers and Recent Fiction). This feels redundant (and possibly unintentional?)
2) There's a Sign Up link. What does signing up do? Is it to write reviews? Subscribe to new books? Something else?
Other than that, I really like the site and added it to my bookmarks. I would like to see the number of reviews without having to hover over the cover, though. It helps put the score in perspective.
I think dark gray text is a good choice for text on computers.
This, of course, makes the site prettier, because book covers are colorful.
Personally though, I'd rather just have a list of [book name - author(s)]
EDIT: Also, you should put the author's name wherever the title is displayed. (eg. in the subgenre pages)
Anyway, why no technical literature section? Why isn't there a genre on text books? Novels are fine, but I like learning something when I read.
You've added a nice design, but the categorization of the books is weak as is the selection itself. I looked at History, which seems to be comprised of 'historical fiction' and I looked for "Tony Judt" who was a significant recently published historian but is not represented.
http://www.librarything.com/ http://www.shelfari.com/ http://49thshelf.com/ http://openbooktoronto.com/ http://www.filedbyauthor.com http://www.thecopia.com/home/index.html http://www.booksprouts.com/ http://www.bookglutton.com/ http://weread.com
You'll note that some of these are dead or dying, which leads me to the small point that I'd make: creating a book site is pretty easy: the audience likes print-media and there are rafts of digitized content available, but getting a site to sustain is hard.
Maybe even more so than for movies readers tend have more in common with some critics then others and the 'meta' opinion is just not that interesting.
2666 (none found), Vanished Kingdoms (none found), Twilight War: After the Fall (tried 'twilight war' and 'after the fall', each gave unrelated results).
No Hemingway, Vonnegut, Faulkner, Kerouac, Fitzgerald.
Why no classics?
Also, your site took almost 5 minutes to load. That is simply unacceptable.
For example, I was interviewed about my book for School Library Journal, but the book reviewer side of the house refuse to even consider it for a proper book review.
Slow as hell, but far from 5 minutes.
Can you please make the text darker - I suffer from some sight problems which make grey on grey quite hard for me to read.
