Category Archives: Books

Books, The Hawaii Project

A few months with Scribd

Leave a comment

oysterWhile I’m a bit late to the game, I’ve spent the last 3 months exploring the subscription model for ebooks. As you may have heard, the inventor of the concept – Oyster – shut down awhile back (Amazon has Kindle Unlimited now). I’d given up on Oyster previously because they never had the books I wanted to read. I’ve previously suggested I think the end is coming for the subscription model, and offered a few ideas for how to save it.

Scribd has become the “last man standing” in terms of a standalone ebooks subscription service. I decided to live with it for 3 months to see how compelling I found it. Here’s my experiences and thoughts.

  • The Reader is very nice.
  • The Catalog isn’t deep enough — it’s “OK” but not compelling.
  • Some interesting browsing and categorization
  • Onboarding is only so-so.
  • Personalization is cumbersome, and the recommendations are lacking (but I did bring me a few winners.
  • No Community.
  • $10 a month isn’t quite worth it.

Before diving into details, here’s the punchline: it’s a good service, I read some good books and enjoyed it, but I don’t plan on keeping my subscription going, as the service stands today.

The Catalog

The first and biggest challenge of the subscription model is the depth of catalog – do they have the books I want to read? Because this model isn’t as profitable for the publishers, they limit which books are available.

By virtue of my book discovery engine (The Hawaii Project), I have a TBR (To Be Read) list as long as your arm. I’m an eclectic reader – my TBR list is a mix of espionage thrillers, historical fiction, literary fiction, a few bestsellers and a smattering of non-fiction – bios, arts books and the like. My list is biased towards more recent books, but contains many classics and older books that are waiting for their turn.

So, how does Scribd fare against my TBR list? An analysis showed that 19% of my TBR list was in there — mostly the lesser-desired books, and older books. The more obscure the book, the more likely Scribd had it. I’ve been dying to read the new bio of John Le Carre, All The Light We Cannot See (one of 2015’s most highly regarded books), and A Crown for Cold Silver, a highly regarded 2015 Fantasy novel. Struck out all around, and on most of the books at the top of my list. The books Scribd were sort of my personal “back catalog” – books I wanted to read, but not bad enough to buy just yet. There were some goodies in there.

Over the course of the 3 months, I read from my TBR list – A Sport and a Pastime, the first classic from James Salter I’d been meaning to read for some time. Whale Road, a Viking novel. Solo, a James Bond novel by an author I love, William Boyd. A truly great book, A Death in Veracruz, a translation of a book by Héctor Aguilar Camín about the Mexican oil wars. Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.

While I think Scribd’s discovery methods aren’t that great, it did manage to unearth a few treasures. I thought I knew every book Bernard Cornwell has written, but Scribd brought me Scoundrel, a sailing novel, which was good fun and unknown to me. And The Far Arena, a truly wonderful Roman gladiator time travel novel. And a few others. So, I read 10 books, for the cost of $30 (3 months of Scribd). Not bad, although I could have bought those books used for about the same price, and wouldn’t have bought them new (or maybe at all) as they weren’t at the top of my list.

Finally, they had a pretty deep Audiobook section – many of the books they did not have in written form, were available in Audiobook form, so if you’re into audio books you might have better luck.

The Experience

I found Scribd’s reader to be very nice. Clean, minimalist and easy to use. I wish I didn’t need another reader (competing with Kindle, iBooks, etc), but it’s easy to use.

Browsing for books is nice, from a user interface perspective (although I think The Hawaii Project’s is better :)). In addition to the usual categories like Literature and Fiction, Biography and the like, they have some interesting sub-genres, Netflix-like, for example, “Set in San Francisco”, “Identity Crisis”, “Muskets & Magic”, “Nordic Noir”, beyond the rather formulaic categories one finds on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. But the books shown in the major categories aren’t the ones you’re looking for, because of the catalog issues.

I found the onboarding process, and the personalization and customization, to be awkward. Since so many of the expected books are missing from Scribd, it’s essential for them to bring me great personalized recommendations, and to make it easy for me. It wasn’t. It was quite awkward to quickly tell them about the many books I’ve read recently, and as a result I’d already read most of the books they recommended – and there was no quick way to tell them that or get them to stop recommending it. A simple checkmark on each book cover would have done it.

Last but not least, there’s no community to speak of on Scribd. I get that it’s a reading platform, not a social network, but in order to survive with a limited catalog they need something to make it sticky. Reddit’s book community is vibrant and millions-strong. Goodreads is the defacto book community and that’s what keeps it going. Scribd needs something besides just a reader to keep going.

Books, The Hawaii Project

A big redesign at The Hawaii Project

Leave a comment

Books PageA big redesign at The Hawaii Project

I’ve just pushed live a pretty major update to the user interface and visual design for The Hawaii Project. (Thanks to Jim Fell for his visual mockup that drove most of the changes to the design. His conversations were immensely helpful. All mistakes and ugliness are, of course, mine.)

As a reminder, The Hawaii Project brings you books and book news you’d never have found on your own. We track what the web’s leading tastemakers and book reviewers are writing about, uncovering things that match your favorite authors, personal interests and current events, and bring them to you daily. 10% of our revenue goes to support 3 great literacy non-profits.

I had a few main goals with the redesign:

  • Communicating that the books in The Hawaii Project are discovered by extracting which books trend-setting publications are writing about, and matching them to your interests.
  • Moving to a more modern visual style.
  • Removing much of the “UI” clutter.

The Hawaii Project works by scanning almost a thousand high quality web sources of writing about books. Everything from The New York Times book reviews to author blogs to niche blogs about special topics, like espionage books, politics or medieval history. It was clear people weren’t getting that, nor were they really aware there were “stories” at all in the system. That is a key differentiator, so it needed to become more obvious.

I radically simplified the Navigation bar so that “Books” and “Stories” were prominent, and introduced a “Recent Stories” panel into the Books page – showing images and snippets from a few stories, as well as highlighting the source of story via text and a logo, with a rollover highlight on the book mentioned in the story.

In moving to a more modern visual style, I wanted (needed!) to get rid of the many distractions and overly ornate visual elements in the existing design. The inspiration for The Hawaii Project was about that feeling of sitting on the beach reading a great book. The visual design tried to capture that with colors from the water, sand and palm trees, but the pages had 2 and sometimes 3 competing gradients (and heavy gradients at that). It wasn’t working.

Here’s the previous design for the Books page and the Book page:

The new design removes virtually all gradients, gets rid of the heavy greens and brown colors, moves to a more typical grey background and black text, simplifies the number of fonts and font-sizes used in the design. It’s far easier on the eyes and much more readily scanned.

Much UI clutter has been removed or hidden. The Navigation bar at top gets a new background image that’s more clearly beach-related, removes a number of extraneous items, and simplifies down to a simple choice of Books | Stories | Following, emulating Flipboard, Pinterest, Medium and the like, and makes clearer what the primary actions are: See Books, Read Stories, or Follow Sources and Authors to get more relevant information. User Account actions (customization, login, list maintenance, etc) are moved to a simplied User drop down (the silhouette menu). The User menu and Search are moved to the top right to get them out of the way.

On the books page, various means of finding an actual copy of the book (OpenLibrary, Scribd, your local library, and so on) are moved to a dropdown, so they’re easily available but out of the way. Secondary metadata about a book (Editions, Categories) are hidden away in containers that can be opened as desired. Stories about a book get more visual play with the introduction of images as a splash of color to draw your eye to them.

Related Books, and the Author’s other books, are moved to the bottom of the page; they can be scrolled to as needed but don’t distract you on first page load.

Here’s the final designs as they are in production today:

Books, The Hawaii Project

Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst

Leave a comment

Alan Furst is the master of the historical spy novel, particularly the era just before World War II erupts. In Spies of the Balkans, he takes on, well, the Balkans.

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

Costa Zannis is a Greek policeman, with his finger on the pulse of the underground in the port city of Salonika, Greece. Soon he’s in a romance, and involved with spies. With the German Army marshaling on the border, …. Alan Furst does his thing. Which is showing you the looming menace of Germany and the wholesale destruction of WWII, in an historically and geographically accurate way. Always good fun.

I’ve actually met Mr. Furst at a book signing. He’s polite, self-effacing, and incredibly knowledgeable about this era of history. Do yourself and him a favor and buy this book, although if you’ve not read him before, you might consider starting with Night Soldiers or one of this earlier works.

Books, The Hawaii Project

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Leave a comment

Tl/DR: If you liked Gorky Park or anything by Martin Cruz Smith, read Child 44.

Leo Demidov is an idealistic state security officer in 1950s Stalinist Russia. He dotes on his wife, (mostly) believes his work supporting the State is really in the best interests of everyone. His job investigating crimes is really only complicated by the State’s insistence that because they live in the worker’s paradise, there aren’t any crimes. When Leo continues to investigate what appears to be a serial killing, when his superiors have declared the case closed, everything he believes will be challenged.

http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Child-44-%28The-Child-44-Trilogy%29–by–Tom-Rob-Smith–60673

What I found most compelling about Child 44, and what made it more than simply a run of the mill thriller set in communist Russia, was the way Smith evoked the uncertainty and terror of living in a world where every friend would betray you to the state because they had to, to save their loved ones, or a world in which to simply be charged was to be proven guilty and sent to a camp or Gulag, most likely to die.

Leo is no Arkady Renko, able to deduce the most difficult conclusions from the faintest of evidence – he’s more of a plodding, not-giving-up-til-I-get it kind of detective. But there are sufficient similarities to Cruz’s works, that if you like them, you’ll enjoy this.

Books, The Hawaii Project

Death in Veracruz, by Héctor Aguilar Camín

Leave a comment

As part of my continuing test of Scribd’s subscription ebooks service, I stumbled on Héctor Aguilar Camín’s Death in Veracruz. Set in the ‘60s and ‘70s during the ascent of Mexico’s oil industry, A Death in Veracruz is a classic of Latin literature, only recently translated ably into English by Chandler Thompson.

Death in Veracruz

This novel marks the long-awaited arrival-in English-of a masterful voice in Mexican and noir fiction Death in Veracruz is a gritty and atmospheric noir centered on the so-called oil wars of the late 1970s, which pitted the extremely powerful and corrupt government-owned oil cartel PEMEX against the agrarian landowners in the coastal regions of Southern Mexico.

Amongst the conflict, graft, corruption and collusion between PEMEX (Mexico’s corrupt government-owned oil company) and the powerful Oil Workers labor union, our narrator (simply called by his nickname, Negro) is an investigative journalist specializing in sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. His lifelong friend Rojano is an aspiring politician and landowner, married to the stunning and willful Anabela. Negro has been in love with Anabela since his youth, but lost out to Rojano. But he remains in their orbit, as Rojano and Anabel slowly draw him into their schemes to rise in power.

Rojano’s enemy (and simultaneous political sponsor and mentor) is Lazaro Pizarro, a charismatic and ruthless leader in the Oil Worker’s union. Pizarro is rendered by turns philosophical, ruthless, cruel and yet clinically unemotional when ordering deaths. Each of the main characters is wholly believable and mesmerizing, but Pizarro stands center to me. As the leader of the oil workers union, he is trying to build the worker’s paradise in Mexico and will let nothing stand in his way. At the prompting of Rojano, Negro interviews Pizarro, and more or less accuses him of murdering people to advance his cause. Pizzaro’s response:

“Try to understand,” he said in a voice that was barely audible. “Listen to what I’m telling you. People there are dying at the rate of two a day just from drinking mezcal. Have you ever been in one of those jails? I was in the one in Chicontepec last week. One of the inmates had killed his mother. Another a friend he was out drinking with. Another raped his daughter and almost beat her to death. None of them remembered what they’d done. All that death and suffering was pointless. It bore no fruit. Nothing blossomed or contributed to the wellbeing of others. These are the deaths that must be stopped, the barren ones driven by mezcal and ignorance. There are always going to be violent deaths, that’s the law of history. It’s up to us to make sure they’re fertile and creative, that’s all.”

Death in Veracruz is a dark, classic noir, where nobody is who they seem, double crosses are common, and nobody can be entirely trusted. It’s also a love story, an exploration of Mexico’s culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and a hell of wild ride. You’re never sure whether you are being told the truth by the author or the characters, or precisely sure what’s actually happened, kind of a Mexican True Detective.

It’s an entirely atmospheric novel; since books and music often go together well, I made a playlist for you as you read:

Death in Veracruz (A Book Playlist)

Death in Veracruz (A Book Playlist) · Playlist · 14 songs