#28 – Year in Books Top 10 Lists

Summary

In this conversation, Ste and Adam discuss the design of the book review page for Hardcover. They explore different layouts and arrangements for showcasing the most read books of the year, as well as the top rated books. They also discuss the possibility of featuring a single book at a time to give it more prominence. The conversation concludes with plans for implementing the design and gathering community submissions.

Takeaways

Consider different layouts and arrangements to showcase books effectively.
Highlight the most read books of each month to capture the dynamic nature of book popularity.
Feature a single book at a time to give it more prominence and celebrate its significance.
Engage the community by gathering submissions and feedback for the book review page.

Chapters

00:00 Designing the Book Review Page
49:05 Highlighting Books of Each Month
52:36 Showcasing Top Rated Books
59:12 Finalizing the Design
01:00:11 Planning for Implementation

Transcript

Adam (00:01.558)
Hey, hey, stay, how’s it going?

Ste (00:04.958)
going well. I’m in Romania at the moment. As you can see, change setup. I position myself strategically next to a fig tree. I’m here for my kids baptism which happened yesterday and yeah that went fine. How about you? All good?

Adam (00:20.942)
Uh, yeah, nothing that interesting. Just normal, normal week at home. Uh, yeah. How’s, how’s the, uh, family been? It’s probably a big event.

Ste (00:29.142)
Bye.

Ste (00:33.494)
Uh, yeah, it was a big event and I mean, intense as you can imagine. I don’t know if you know how it goes in the Orthodox churches. I think it’s similar to Catholics. Basically you take the baby and you skinny, deep humor her in like a basin of water and they’re just taken by the priest over there and they’re dipped but naked. And yeah, that’s how it goes. Plus a sermon before, which was pretty nice. I mean.

Yeah, I didn’t know what it was about, but it turned out to actually be pretty cool. They had singers in the back, usually like auto-tester stuff. So yeah, that was fun.

Adam (01:19.299)
Hehehe

Adam (01:22.918)
I’ve never been to an Orthodox church. That would be, that would be an interesting like difference. I like went to a couple of Catholic churches growing up. Um, and my parents were Unitarian for a little while, but yeah, since then haven’t really been to church.

Ste (01:40.118)
Yeah, well, I’m not like big on church either but I think like the main difference between the Catholic ones and the Orthodox ones is that the Catholic ones have statues, the Orthodox ones are painted like heavily in the inside and the shape they’re much smaller and

configuration is different? Well, someone with more knowledge into this will definitely explain it better. I know there’s like some specific church stuff going on there, but yeah. It was pretty cool. Everything’s shiny and golden. So, yeah.

Adam (02:07.745)
it

Adam (02:16.278)
Yeah.

Adam (02:22.243)
Yeah, it’s, it’s funny that, you know, now I live in Salt Lake City and I’ve never been to a, an LDS church because you’re not allowed to enter them unless you’re LDS. So I’m only able to like tour these like, uh, old, like 150 year old buildings that are like blocks away from our apartment. But, uh, if, if a friend of ours, like we’re to get married and they’re in the church, we’re not allowed to attend the ceremony because we’re not allowed to go into the church.

Ste (02:40.831)
No, I-

Ste (02:49.61)
Wow, that’s weird. And LDS is that like, I don’t know anything about it.

Adam (02:56.11)
It’s a, yeah, a latter-day science Mormonism, that, yeah. Yeah.

Ste (02:58.946)
Okay, okay, okay LDS. Yeah now it makes sense. Yeah, we have that like in Europe as well Yeah, that’s really weird and like the churches the other churches the old ones Are they like still functional or are they like more?

Adam (03:15.314)
Yeah. Like, uh, the kind of the big church, which is like the head of the Mormon or LDS religion is like three blocks away from us. So I like go buy it on my, uh, like evening walks. Um, but they’ve been doing renovations on it since 2020. So it just looks like scaffolding right now.

Ste (03:35.686)
Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I like old churches visiting old churches as well. Got plenty of those back in the UK I haven’t been to like one of their what do you call when they give you like the little biscuit?

Adam (03:38.862)
Thanks for watching!

Adam (03:49.894)
Oh, yeah. Like taking communion.

Ste (03:51.242)
That thing. Oh yeah, communion. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a pretty nice biscuit. Plus wine.

Adam (03:55.23)
Yeah.

Ste (03:59.84)
I didn’t mind.

Nice.

Adam (04:02.89)
Well, aside from that, um, yeah, I’ve just been, uh, mostly just working on, uh, this, this weekend, I worked on like my personal blog for like a lot of the weekend, which was like fun because like in the last, I don’t know, like five months on hardcover, I felt like I learned so much stuff about next JS and react. Like that, that the big upgrade we did in August, like all of that.

knowledge, I was able to like apply it to my blog now and now it’s like, Oh, this is how it’s, this is how it’s supposed to work rather than initially when I was making it, it was, you know, when you’re making something and you’re learning as you’re making it and, uh, it’s, you look back on it a month later and you’re like, well, this, this is pretty rough. That was how it looked from the stuff I made last December looking at it now.

Ste (04:51.788)
Yeah.

Ste (04:57.914)
Yeah, that’s nice. Yeah, it must feel nice. I mean, this is like the good part when you have like multiple like projects. Once you like gain like knowledge on how to do something with one, when you jump onto the next. Yeah, this is what happens. I also get that with some stuff. Nice.

Adam (05:23.507)
Has there been anything that’s jumped out like that for hardcover? Where it’s like you used some skill or something that you learned on another project and you’re like, oh, I need to move this into hardcover.

Ste (05:36.65)
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, there’s been lots of stuff. I mean, lately I’ve gotten into some animations. I’ve been trying to replicate some of the things that you shared in the development channel as well. I’ve been trying to do that page thickness thing for like a week now, and I think I pretty much nailed it as a React component. So Hardcover has been great for me as well for like this specific reason. It’s like a…

really nice playgrounds to experiment with the things, you know, we like never like dreamed of like implementing in other websites and this is yeah, really cool. So I guess mostly with code, I’ve got that thing. With design, maybe with design as well. I think like the design library implementing it on high cover.

has been pretty helpful. I mean, I did the same stuff for other stuff I’ve been working on as well, but it’s a pretty thorough library and some components are unlike others that I’ve worked on. So like combined components, like the book cover, that kind of stuff and like the bigger UI elements. Yeah, that’s been you.

Adam (07:05.863)
Yeah. I had never done much with like a UI, like creating our own custom UI library, but having, having it now is, it would be hard to go back to using like an off the shelf UI library and just like using everything that they give you and nothing else having like those custom parts for like, here’s what our button looks like and things like that.

Ste (07:30.474)
Yeah, plus we got some really nifty components, and I think with the size of our team, the way it’s shaped, I mean, if someone were to look at the codes coming from a bigger company, I think they wouldn’t at any point guess we’re a four-person team working on it, and you and I working on basically the bulk of the code.

Adam (07:51.427)
Hehehe

Adam (07:58.891)
Yeah.

Ste (08:00.778)
I’ve seen less complex stuff for teams that are like 50 plus people.

Adam (08:07.814)
It’s, yeah, there, there was a, um, a Ruby on rails documentary that came out this week, which was kind of interesting. It was kind of like, uh, this is company, uh, honeypot and they do, I think they do like recruiting or place job placement or something like that, but they’ve been doing documentaries about different tech things. Like they did one on react. Um, they did one on graph QL, I want to say, and some other things.

Ste (08:08.13)
So.

Adam (08:34.458)
So this one was on Ruby on Rails, which is the language we use at Hardcover for our backend. And yeah, that was kind of neat to see because the framework kind of started in 2005. And it kind of started as a framework and a language because the Ruby language wasn’t very popular. So it was kind of just, kind of, imagine starting a framework for a language that no one uses yet. So,

both of them were kind of rising at the same time. And yeah, it was a good documentary. It reminded me of like all the fun of just building stuff on Rails and how much you can do with a very small team using Rails. Yeah.

Ste (09:18.738)
Yeah, yeah, I saw you shared that in the in the discord. I was gonna watch that That’s a really good like sum up. It’s it’s got me interesting What would you say like is the main thing that makes Ruby on rails shine as opposed to like other things? I know I’ve seen it. I think Airbnb used it at first as well but then they moved to something else when they scaled and

Adam (09:41.68)
Mm-hmm.

Ste (09:45.846)
I’m not sure why, what were the technical details, but I was wondering as an outsider like why it’s so good at powering and ramping up projects so fast from a tech perspective.

Adam (10:04.831)
I think one of the things is just the, like it’s a full stack framework, so you can do everything from like, basically the front end, the back end, all of it in one code base. But in addition to that, there’s helpers for connecting with the database, like built in. So like with the.

with most frameworks, you have to pick, like, this is gonna be my front-end framework, this is gonna be my back-end framework, this is gonna be my database framework, this is gonna be my migration framework, this is gonna be my API framework, and you have to combine all of those, and then you have to add onto that, like, this is gonna be my testing framework, this is gonna be my deployment framework. So, Rails kind of grouped all of those into one framework from the start. So you don’t have to make all these different decisions, you just get all these tools that are designed to work together.

And that makes kind of the connection between them a lot stronger because, you know, if you’re, if you’re a library builder and you’re building for 10 frameworks, you’re probably not going to be able to optimize for all 10 of them. While in Rails, everything’s optimized to work with each other in a really nice way.

Ste (11:16.246)
Nice. Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, yeah, that makes a lot of sense why, like, it’s, like, has, after all these years, because it seems to still, like, be regarded as, like, really solid solution, even now when you’ve got, like, many other, like, options. But, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Nice.

Adam (11:18.696)
Yeah.

Adam (11:37.782)
Yeah.

Adam (11:41.888)
Yeah.

Ste (11:43.098)
Yeah. And on the what are we doing with hardcover front to switch from like the technical side of things. Maybe we can sum up what we’re doing right now. And maybe we can talk about some of the things we’re planning, including some of like our research efforts and

Adam (11:51.235)
and

Ste (12:07.454)
what direction they might head in. I think that’s pretty interesting.

Adam (12:14.834)
Yeah, I think, yeah, we’re, I’ve been mostly fixing bugs this past week and doing some research analysis on discussions from the survey results, um, that I shared with you. And kind of one of the ways that, uh, I’ve always done that in the past and did for this is kind of like, look over all the survey results and start trying to pick out themes that lots and lots of people said for each.

question or each screen. That way you start seeing like, oh, on this list of discussions page, a lot of people said it was busy or a lot of people said, maybe on the single discussion page, that it felt like it was out of place and it didn’t have, it didn’t belong to the book that it was on. So you start like seeing those trends and start

then the next steps kind of to issue recommendations based on those trends to in the next version of the prototype. That’s kind of where we’re at now. We’re kind of made that list of things to work on in the next discussion prototype.

Ste (13:23.994)
Yeah, the feedback’s been really good as well. I mean, the feedback from the calls has been amazing and the feedback we’ve got from the forum has also been good. We still got that link up, so if you didn’t fill it in, there’s still time to see the updated prototype at the end of this week, hopefully, because…

Yeah, I’m guessing we can use the same link and just update that based on what we found in this round of interviews. I think we were at least 15 in-depth interviews about discussions and so far those teams you mentioned, those have been great so we’ve got lots of feedback we can actually act on.

And the general feeling seems to be really good. I’m really like hype because many people have been validating this. So no one has said, what the hell is this? So we haven’t gotten that reaction from anyone. And we’ve even interviewed people who wouldn’t like use it and they still found like some use in it. I think that’s been like my biggest surprise.

Adam (14:28.686)
Yeah.

Ste (14:46.026)
Because there are people who wouldn’t participate in a discussion for various amounts of reasons. Like, you’re just not that social or you prefer to just watch and lurk or read other people’s discussions. But even for those people, we’ve got the specific feedback that they know some people that…

Adam (14:46.529)
Yeah.

Ste (15:14.522)
are their friends or they imagined how others might use it, which is great.

Adam (15:21.81)
Yeah. I think one of the things that stood out to me was that one thing that kept coming up in the feedback was like one, like the, the reason why people would engage in a discussion about books, um, was very similar to why you would engage in discussion in a book club. Um, it was like, like the, the things that kept coming up were like, I wanted to see if like my feelings and thoughts about the book were

like shared with other people. Basically, you know, is my opinion unique or was everyone feeling this way? They wanted to get answers to questions that they had at the end of the book. And then they wanted to like just learn more about the book. Like they wanted to see what they missed. So I feel like if we can successfully answer like those three use cases with our discussion solution, it’ll be.

it’ll be pretty impactful for a really wide range of people.

Ste (16:23.206)
Yeah, yeah, that’s gonna be, that’s gonna be great. And I think I mentioned this last time as well. I was searching for places to share that discussion link and I’ve stumbled upon a lot of literary or book blogs or places where people talked about books and seeing how unstructured they were and how people were struggling to, for instance, if you wanted to talk about the book, you had to search

for that specific part of the forum, for that specific genre. I hope that somebody mentioned that book, and it wasn’t even tied to a book, so there was a lot of searching going on. And the UI was basically the old forum UI, which is pretty good. It’s what Reddit built on. But I’m thinking merging that functionality with…

fresher approach and tying that to the book itself because people like read the book and they want to talk about that book they don’t want to like talk about whatever. Books having that like origin is gonna play out well.

Adam (17:37.611)
Yeah.

Adam (17:44.012)
Yeah.

Um, yeah, aside from, um, discussions, which I feel like the rest of this year will probably continue planning. Like I think I initially was pretty ambitious trying to say, like, let’s get an MVP of it. I think I’d be much more happy if we like just nail the year in books and market that and also just like continue on research and planning on discussions. Because as, as we’ve talked to more people, I’m realizing like,

Ste (18:06.643)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (18:17.75)
you know, where we decide on the scope of V1 of it is gonna make a big difference on what we put out for the first version, like whether we integrate with like authors, whether it shows up on your profile, whether we do some kind of discussion feed, all these other places that discussions kind of branch out into the site, which we are kind of just starting to like.

figure out where those are and what’s most important. So, so I feel like planning, it’s going to be good. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Ste (18:48.586)
Yeah, exactly. I saw someone mention. Yeah. Yeah, no, no. On the same page with you. I was saying that somebody actually mentioned that the feed is kind of bare bones right now. Where we’re on that. I mean, the reason it’s bare bones right now is that with discussions, that’s probably going to change a lot because it will take both the book updates, the list updates, the Go progress updates.

and the discussions and we’re trying to make a feed which is as integrated as possible without being too annoying for people or being too irrelevant or being too whatever chaotic. We’re trying to make it nice and give you updates that are really interesting. So yeah.

is gonna, that’s gonna change. So the bare bones feed is a work in progress, but we’ll update it after we deliver discussions. That’s like the big moment to wait for, for nicer feed. But when we do that, it’s gonna be really nice because you actually see people’s thoughts and be able to share your thoughts as well and respond to people. So, yeah, that’s gonna be good.

Ah…

Adam (20:17.35)
and yeah.

Ste (20:17.478)
Oh yeah, someone’s asking for the discussions. Oh yeah, here we go.

Adam (20:22.426)
And so kind of like kind of shifting gears over to like the year in books. Um, one thing that kind of was interesting is like, let me, let me pull up the prototype and I’ll share my screen here because we, we did a neat poll this last week and got some good results from the community that I can go over. Let’s see.

Ste (20:37.274)
Oh yeah.

Ste (20:41.93)
Mm-hmm.

Ste (20:45.726)
Yeah, I was a bit surprised, but then again, not so surprised.

Adam (20:48.924)
Hehehe

Cool, so yeah, we did a poll on the Discord and we were kind of talking about these three prototypes for how we show a top 10 list in the year of books. So this was the first one with the cover on the left and these here. I can’t remember, was this here or was this like down here somewhere?

Ste (21:17.954)
It might have moved it. It might have been down there. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Adam (21:22.894)
because I’m thinking these were like all the way across.

Ste (21:26.058)
You might have been all the way across.

Adam (21:30.07)
But yeah, it was something like this. And then second one, kind of similar, but on the right side. And then the third one was with the books all across the bottom. And from the poll, the first one had 14 votes. The second one had three votes. And the third one had seven votes. So first one.

Ste (21:32.181)
Yeah.

Ste (21:45.583)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (22:00.114)
was the top one from the Discord. So I think that’s a resounding vote from the community, which is good. It wasn’t like, I was worried it would be like just the same for everything.

Ste (22:03.336)
Yes.

Ste (22:14.37)
Uh huh, yeah, that’s what surprised me. I was sincerely thinking number three would be the most appreciated, but yeah, number one, that’s such a big difference, and that’s gonna be really easy to implement on mobile as well. We just do one column and then two columns and then that’s it, so I’m happy with that.

Adam (22:29.326)
Thanks for watching!

Adam (22:41.91)
Yeah.

Ste (22:43.038)
We just have to implement it. I’ll jump in towards the end of the weekend, actually code this layout in. So this should be good. So it’s the first book. Then you’ve got a nice review from that book. So if you have a favorite book, I think this is a good time to get those really smart reviews in, because we might pick it for this. And if we have a book that’s number one, your review might get featured.

Adam (23:13.57)
Yeah. And I think, I wonder if like this part here, I wonder if that should link to the review rather than the user. What do you think? Yeah.

Ste (23:13.602)
So, good time to do that.

Ste (23:23.738)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, because then they can see, they can follow someone from their review page, it’s just like two clicks away.

Adam (23:34.738)
And yeah, it makes me also wonder if where we show this review, like if we even need this or if like using some kind of like quote thing like to indicate like this is a quote. It’s like

Ste (23:46.623)
I think it’s pretty.

Ste (23:50.97)
Yeah, just the quote icon should do it.

Adam (23:56.666)
Oh yeah, like a… Let me see.

Ste (24:01.73)
Yeah, maybe just I think quote is the icon for that. Let me grab an icon from the library. Wait, I’m in the browser. So I’m severely impacted by what I can do.

Adam (24:14.429)
I’m out.

Ste (24:17.95)
Where can I find an icon? Oh, here we go.

So I guess the quote icon should be.

Ste (24:33.442)
Okay, I’m gonna let you do it because I’m on a little trackpad from the laptop and it’s not doing me any favors.

Adam (24:36.842)
I’m sorry.

Adam (24:43.734)
Want me to move it from somewhere? Oh yeah.

Ste (24:52.707)
I got the icon, so let’s see if there’s a quote icon that we can use.

Adam (25:10.638)
If you want, I could do it now that I have it installed.

Ste (25:13.57)
Oh yeah, if you can do that, please. It’s so when you’re not working on your setup, nothing seems to work. Oh, there’s not a quote icon. Let’s see.

Adam (25:23.682)
Here, I’ll uh…

Adam (25:27.574)
Let me try…

Ste (25:30.95)
It might be something like quote marks or something like that.

Adam (25:40.031)
Yeah, let’s see.

Adam (25:44.27)
Font awesome. Search for quotes. Quotes. And then there’s quote left and quote right.

Ste (25:53.382)
Oh, yeah. Makes sense. It’s always something like this with font awesome.

Adam (26:03.266)
So is it camel case or is it dash, F-ed, left, A, okay.

Ste (26:06.645)
No, I think it’s just a dash. Yeah

Ste (26:12.77)
Alright, here we go.

Adam (26:15.303)
See ya.

Adam (26:21.718)
I’ll let you do final decision on this. I’m just playing with it. Ha ha.

Ste (26:25.95)
Oh yeah, no, just put it like… that’s good. Or just like put it on top and then… Just to mark it as a quote.

Adam (26:30.38)
Yeah.

Adam (26:37.182)
Oh yeah.

Yeah. Another thing was like…

Ste (26:45.247)
Oh yeah, and just put it there and that’s like, right.

Adam (26:49.682)
Might be overkill but…

Ste (26:53.215)
Nah, that’s good.

Adam (26:59.442)
I don’t know, maybe not that. It looks weird with that adjusting.

Ste (27:02.046)
Yeah, or just on top maybe.

Adam (27:09.198)
Hmm.

Ste (27:09.479)
And at the end.

Adam (27:12.598)
So I mean like, hmm.

Ste (27:14.942)
No, no, it should be like that.

Ste (27:20.93)
So we don’t have to do…

Adam (27:29.031)
Yeah.

Ste (27:33.406)
this one.

Ste (27:38.922)
Something like that should work. If I get better ideas when I’m actually implementing it.

I’ll see how the positioning of the second one goes. Or we could just put it in quotes, normal quotes, and it’s…

Adam (27:48.117)
Yeah.

Adam (27:56.442)
Yeah, I mean, that’s, that does, I think I actually prefer that. What do you think?

Ste (28:02.094)
Yeah, yeah, we could have that. Yeah, maybe just that.

Ste (28:11.606)
What does letterbox do? Letterbox doesn’t have an icon. Or do they? Yeah.

Adam (28:15.498)
Yeah, they just use quotes in a serif font. But yeah, I think for us a serif would be overkill for this.

Ste (28:20.074)
Yeah.

Ste (28:23.974)
Yeah, definitely. Now just leave it for the title. That’s enough.

Adam (28:32.11)
Cool.

Ste (28:32.85)
This is looking good. I’m excited about what reviews we can find. This one was actually on hardcover. It wasn’t for the predictable hardbreaks of Imogen Finch, but… It was from… yeah, I think it was from Hellblade.

Adam (28:44.063)
Thanks for helping.

Adam (28:47.905)
Yeah.

Ste (28:51.218)
Yeah, and for… Oh, yeah. And the books over here, I’m guessing we can use the same layout for trends. I was trying something before the call, but basically, we can reuse the same component with trends. So for the book trends, we have…

Adam (28:51.957)
which will be on the list.

Adam (29:05.934)
Thanks for watching!

Ste (29:21.562)
those titles. Let’s say, I remember we had Dark Academia. So you can just do something like this.

Ste (29:41.25)
Trans, arthidemia, and maybe have like some, a bit of a description text. What do you think? Description text for the trans or is that too much?

Adam (29:59.222)
I think we could it would be a very like yeah, just a couple words

Ste (30:00.886)
Just like a few. Yeah.

few lines.

Adam (30:12.574)
Ahem.

Ste (30:13.362)
Well, with different fonts that I don’t have access to now.

Ste (30:23.219)
Oh yeah, here we go.

Ste (30:30.27)
And it’s probably gonna vary because some trends will have three books, some will have five books, some will have, I guess, 10 books max. Should we like cap it at 10 books, even though, you know, we have more? Oh yeah, I forgot about the image.

Adam (30:54.066)
Send back, and then send this one to back.

Ste (31:05.19)
Oh yeah, we could actually put it like underneath the covers even.

Ste (31:13.29)
Well, yeah, it is a bit, maybe we can do the thing with the gradient so it can fade out just like this.

Adam (31:15.892)
Yeah…

Ste (31:30.851)
and…

Ste (31:37.914)
Oh yeah, or like that. And we can have this and this left aligned over there.

Adam (31:45.235)
Oh yeah.

Ste (31:47.034)
and just have it here and have this here.

Ste (32:05.05)
That is not too bad.

Ste (32:19.786)
Yeah, and obviously, a picture for, like, Suits for Dark Academia.

Adam (32:25.566)
Yeah, having like all the custom images for each section is going to be fun.

Ste (32:31.106)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I can wait to prompt them from the mop and For trends what else watch should we have here? I think this is enough, right? Just like the books so these are basically like snippets of What we thought was interesting and we also have that document that Jeff shared with Librarian with the librarian channel. So if you’re a librarian You can add

Adam (32:37.386)
Yeah, and this…

Ste (33:00.062)
books or even suggest new categories for trends, if you have like a favorite category, like fantasy romance or something else.

Adam (33:13.93)
Yeah.

Ste (33:14.358)
Uh…

Adam (33:19.87)
Sorry, I was asking chat GPT to generate a description text for this.

Ste (33:26.49)
Oh, nice. Perfect. Yeah, if I had like, if I was on my actual laptop, I could have even generated an image, but next time.

Adam (33:39.548)
a single sentence about dark academia as a book genre explaining what it is. Just, you know, then it always generates something way longer, something like shorter.

Ste (33:55.706)
Yeah, I think you can mention like the number of characters and it’s pretty accurate

Adam (34:04.022)
Yeah, this is like.

Ste (34:05.542)
Yeah, I’ve been using the… Oh, here we go. No, that’s actually good. But, you know, the length is…

Adam (34:09.624)
Yeah, that’s one.

Adam (34:16.838)
Oh, here’s a, I just said shorter and it gave me that.

Ste (34:22.19)
Ah, oh yeah, here we go. Yeah, that’s way better. We might even mention why we chose some… Yeah, that’s perfect.

Adam (34:31.542)
Yeah, I have a feeling for our actual one. Well, yeah, well, we’ll mention like why, or, you know, highlight the books that are actually in the, in the genre or that we chose.

Ste (34:40.846)
Yeah, exactly. And I’m curious, like, which the which one once will get like in the top three or like

there’s no ranking for this, right? So it’s just like our subjective, I guess.

Adam (34:58.701)
Yeah.

Ste (34:59.33)
choice.

Adam (35:01.854)
Yeah, so yeah, because of that, yeah, sometimes it’ll be three books, sometimes it’ll be five. So yeah, that actually got me wondering what other like card styles we need for this page. So we have like our trend style, we have our like top 10 list style. Are there others we might want?

Ste (35:20.126)
Mm-hmm.

Ste (35:32.098)
There are some simpler ones if we’re gonna do them. So there’s one for the lists where we feature lists that are like really nice from the past year, created by readers on hardcover. So we’ll need something, I guess, similar to the books. Letterbox does like just like huge like layout with one list underneath the other.

So it’s just list after list after list. We could do that. There’s also some author highlights that we need. So highlights that feature author profile pictures, and maybe short bios. And there are some which are a bit.

Adam (36:21.728)
Oh yeah.

Ste (36:31.642)
Oh yeah, it is just saying in the chat. What about the sort of timeline with the classic of every era of a genre? We need, we have the one for like best book of the month, so we could use a similar one. So basically this is a more complex one. Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m wondering how we could do it. I tried some things, but I’m not like 100% happy with them over there.

Adam (37:00.554)
Yeah, yeah, I do kind of like this one as another style. I guess this is like kind of the same, just left and right aligned and.

Ste (37:06.879)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Adam (37:12.37)
Yeah. I think I like it when it’s. Yeah. Not over the image because I feel like it gets a little, little busy, but this one with it, like just a hint on it or even like, yeah.

Ste (37:20.123)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ste (37:25.394)
Even that. Yeah, exactly. Now it’s good.

Ste (37:31.647)
Yeah.

Ste (37:35.422)
Yeah, and the timeline might be nice as well. Maybe something to just like. So this is like for this year. So.

Ste (37:47.702)
Maybe for the top books in by genre Maybe you can select the genre and then get the top books and the genres can just be tabs or like buttons you can browse

Adam (38:01.646)
Hmm. Yeah. Cause I’m thinking that one thing that I’m thinking about for this is what if we don’t make it like interactive at all, like in terms of like filtering or changing it, it’s more of like, like you could, you could get all the information on it by just like hitting space bar over and over again.

Ste (38:24.07)
Yeah, OK. Yeah, I like that. Just scrolling through it. Yeah, that’s a good idea. So another section would be media. We have one for library highlights, so the best independent libraries that we liked in the past year. That might be a fun one, because we’ll also generate a bit of traffic for these libraries as well. I think that’s going to be.

Adam (38:25.99)
Thank you.

Ste (38:54.454)
pretty good. And if they find the Harkover Union review, maybe they’ll share it as well, because they’ve been featured. And long-term, maybe it will even turn into a thing.

Adam (39:09.843)
Yeah.

one yeah so like if we have a list of books listed like authors and same for things like if we have a list of like a top 10 um like books by women authors of the month or of the year i could use kind of the same um structure if we were to do something like

Ste (39:35.144)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (39:38.358)
Um, there’s one other one I, oh yeah. Yeah. It was the best books by month or top read books by month. This is, this is a category that, um, I’m trying to figure out how we could best do it because like, let’s say we have. Like what, what we’re trying to show are like, here are the books. Well, I guess the one question is, what are we trying to show for that one? Um, one route is here’s the books that the most people read in January or here are the books.

Here are the books that were released in January that got the most reads. And those are two different things.

Ste (40:12.85)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, if we go for the first one, my worry is that there’s going to be the same books in January and February and March, and there’s going to be a huge overlap, right, according to our data. So maybe the second option would be way better.

Adam (40:26.079)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam (40:35.006)
Yeah. And that’s, that’s kind of what I’m leaning towards too. It’s like, and it also helps for books that are like, you know, there will be a December section and December. Like those books won’t be able to be featured almost anywhere else in this list for rankings or for popularity because those books haven’t had much time to grow on the platform. Like they could be, they could be selected for our genre sections, of course, where we’re like selecting them, but less for the

Ste (40:52.93)
Mm, true.

Adam (41:04.31)
the ones that are based on engagement.

Ste (41:07.426)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s actually really good because we have most read books and that’s overall But most anticipated by month or whatever wording we use I mean most anticipated can be like the exact thing you described so books that appeared in that month and Are read by most people on hardcover? Or like even yeah

Adam (41:31.21)
Yeah. I, I kind of, I kind of do like this layout. Like kind of, what if we did some kind of take on this where we like repeated that over and over again? Like, and, but like, do you think that would be a lot if we just like show this section like 12 times or would we want to like,

Ste (41:46.096)
Yeah.

Adam (41:59.554)
change the side or something or.

Ste (42:03.202)
really because the books will be different, the image is gonna be different, so I think there’s like enough surprise over there to just make you scroll and we can just try it and it’s 12 months so just going through them wouldn’t take long and I think there’s gonna be like enough interest at least for me that’s what I do on a site just like out of curiosity to see…

the actual books and what image we actually chose. Because if we do images like that, I think it’s gonna be like nice. And yeah, we could do like more of it, one left aligned, one right aligned. We can actually like mark that up real quick. Let’s see.

Ste (43:02.338)
So I’ll remove this actually because it might get in the way.

Ste (43:16.05)
I’m really not doing anything my way today.

Yeah, I think I’m gonna let you like for some… yeah.

Adam (43:25.746)
I could, how about I move this part.

Ste (43:32.202)
this group somehow.

Ste (43:36.63)
But okay.

Adam (43:38.471)
Yeah.

Adam (43:47.246)
I’m just gonna select them, copy it, and then move it down here.

Ste (43:51.212)
Yeah, yeah, that’s best.

I’ve opened Figma in the browser right now and I think that’s why it’s not cooperating at all.

Ste (44:05.978)
Oh, here we go. It looks even better with that background. Maybe for like once we can just leave our regular background and…

Yeah, and that would be…

Ste (44:27.486)
I think you have to go like around all of them.

Adam (44:32.315)
Oh yeah, I see. Like that.

Ste (44:34.225)
Yeah

Adam (44:36.046)
So if we move those and almost just alternated them like this.

Ste (44:43.275)
Yeah.

Ste (44:52.211)
I think that’s going to be nice. Let me replace the image as well.

Adam (44:56.31)
Yeah, or maybe instead of having this here, this becomes like up here.

And then there’s like a little space between them.

Ste (45:08.762)
Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, I don’t mind the space. That’s it.

Adam (45:17.955)
It gets me wondering if we need…

like this as a badge or if this should be like, I don’t know, it kind of looks like a book title in this font if we did like most red.

Ste (45:37.074)
Well, it looks like a title We’re just also using it for the book title, but that looks good. I Think it’s gonna be clear

Adam (45:47.298)
Yeah.

Ste (45:51.294)
Let’s try it. And those are going to be some nice layouts, especially with the scroll snapping. So you’d be able to just move like one, two, three. Plus you’ll have the navigation as well. So you can jump.

Ste (46:08.682)
uh to another section if but this should be nice to browse

Adam (46:16.542)
Yeah. And this would be a little review as well about the book. And these would be art generated based on the book itself, right? Like the number one.

Ste (46:25.659)
Mm-hmm.

Ste (46:31.102)
Yes. Yeah.

Adam (46:35.43)
And maybe like for here we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Maybe we can just keep it to five and make these a yeah.

Ste (46:45.682)
Yeah, that works. So top five. Yeah, let me just align it so that, here we go.

Adam (47:05.374)
Oh, it’s a little big.

Ste (47:08.306)
Oh yeah, but just, I mean, yeah, they should be… I mean, I don’t even mind, like, that size. That should be good, and I can generate, like, taller images for this one.

Adam (47:20.042)
Yeah, I’m just trying to keep these smaller than this one.

Ste (47:24.646)
Oh, that one. Yeah, that makes sense. We could just make that one bigger.

Ste (47:38.122)
and maybe we can, I mean, just leave part of the review there if it’s longer. Some reviews might be like way long.

Adam (47:51.046)
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, this seems like a lot of images.

Ste (47:57.546)
Yeah, but you know, who doesn’t love images? I love images.

Adam (48:01.795)
Yeah. It’s like, I think I, yeah.

Adam (48:10.368)
Yeah, either one.

Ste (48:10.686)
I think we can also tweak it once, because this doesn’t have the exact same sizes as the covers we use in the code. So yeah, we’re gonna tweak it over there probably, like quite a lot until it looks like, right? But yeah, I love this. It’s very easy to make it responsive as well. And those images are gonna be like pretty kick ass. So we’ll have 12 of those.

Adam (48:22.912)
Yeah, that’s true.

Adam (48:37.022)
Yeah, I see each of those as kind of like a love letter to the author. Like, you know, we’re doing something fun that like celebrates their book. And this’ll allow it to like, like 12 books to shine throughout the year, rather than like, that was one of the things I worried about. Like you said, if we said the most read books in January, the most read books in February, the most read books in March.

Like I looked at the data and yeah, it’s, it’s very different than, than movies where like a movie comes out and it has a very short period of time where everyone’s watching it. And then the next movie comes out and everyone’s watching it. Um, well books, it comes out and people have to finish the books they’re currently reading and they have to figure out like, maybe, maybe they have something else really high on their list and then they start reading it. So they might really want to read a book that comes out in January, but might not start it until.

Ste (49:11.138)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (49:34.87)
later on in the year. And I think this’ll highlight those books that people were most excited about from each month. So yeah, I think this is a good route.

Ste (49:43.426)
Yeah, yeah definitely. I mean it’s a way different dynamic than movies, so definitely that. I mean this works way better.

I noticed because I was looking at the Trending section on Hardcover and for the past three months it’s kind of like the same books switching places. So we might have just had like January, these three books, then February, these three books but you know number one is a different one, number two is like but the same three books like over and over again or just like a variation of that so this is way better.

Adam (50:23.616)
Yeah.

Ste (50:25.77)
The trending is a good raster. It’s like sports when someone comes in and dominates for a whole year and then somebody else comes and breaks the record and they do that for a whole bunch of time. I think that’s closer to how it goes than movies for books.

Adam (50:30.734)
I’m gonna go to bed.

Adam (50:45.386)
Yeah, I like the comparison with the Nintendo Power magazine as a kid. Did you ever read Nintendo Power?

Ste (50:53.48)
No, but I think yeah, I kind of know what it’s about. Yeah

Adam (50:57.062)
Yeah, every month they did this ranking of like the top 20 games on each system. So like Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Game Boy at the time. And everyone, I think you had to like call a phone number and like vote over the phone because it was pre-internet and then they would publish those in the issue every month. And what was funny was like, there would be games that were released in 1992 that were still on the list in 1998.

because they had such adamant fans that just wanted that one in the top. While I think the only way that would happen here is if people are rereading the same books over and over again, which happens less often, still somewhat, but enough that it should eventually fall as a book falls out of popularity or something else becomes more popular.

Ste (51:50.574)
Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m betting if you had like a hardcover hotline that people would ring, would have like some hardcore book fans just like ringing it, saying they want that book in there. So yeah, we’re not gonna do that. Or it would be fun at some point.

Adam (51:58.806)
Hehehe

Adam (52:06.526)
Yeah. And maybe the last thing that I was going to bring up was, so we have, you know, we’ll have a bunch of sections that look like this and a bunch of sections for the months and a bunch of sections for the trends and some other things. One other section that I feel like deserves a lot of prominence. Well,

I guess two things. Let me unshare this and I’ll share my other screen here. And this is kind of inspired by letterboxed as well. So they have a.

Adam (52:56.17)
when it comes to like the highest rated books of the year, or they have it like one at a time. I know we’re kind of going over like the idea that we’ll just show all 10 of them. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on showing like a single book at a time anywhere.

Ste (53:20.474)
Yeah, we could do that. It’s weird because is this a different resolution? I know or maybe it’s some other layouts. They do have like the ones where there’s oh, yeah this layout Okay. Yeah We could do that. What are you thinking for like one book at a time? Is it for the trends or is it for like the most read?

Adam (53:46.806)
Yeah, I was thinking for the most read books of the year and potentially the most read books of 2023 and potentially the most read of the year. But maybe we just show it for like, maybe we just show it for the first three books and then after that, everything becomes lists, which is kind of what Letterboxd decided on too.

It’s kind of just a way to celebrate like here are the top rated books of the year. Or that it’s kind of like, these are the three books that the community was most passionate about from the year. I feel like how can we like showcase those in a very unique way. Marcel the show with shoes on was such a good movie.

Ste (54:20.624)
Mm-hmm.

Ste (54:26.667)
Yeah.

Ste (54:32.54)
Yeah.

Ste (54:35.99)
I haven’t seen that, but I have to see it.

Ste (54:42.264)
Those snail things look very funny.

Adam (54:46.844)
Yep.

Ste (54:47.994)
Yeah, I’ve rewatched Uncut Gems yesterday. My, I have a younger brother and he didn’t watch that. I just got him like to make a little boxed account and yeah, he was mind blown.

Adam (54:51.477)
Hmm.

Adam (54:59.917)
It just feels like watching anxiety in movie form.

Ste (55:03.138)
Oh god, yeah, that’s like the high point of a movie, but it starts from a high point and it goes to a high point towards the end. Yeah, I don’t know. Safdie Brothers, they’re like something else. Yeah, definitely let’s do it with one. I’m guessing we could do the same thing. So it would be like this exact same layout, but without the books and maybe with…

Ste (55:34.934)
So this goes away. We just have that one book and maybe the image we do like a larger image to like celebrate that book properly and we might even like maybe yeah exactly. Yeah exactly.

Adam (55:54.57)
like full out. It’s really just giving it more space to breathe, but it’s like the same content really.

Ste (56:01.038)
Yeah, so I might just like to do this, make the gradient bigger. And this works. This would take up the whole screen. And we can specify different prompts, specifics to make it more.

Ste (56:25.534)
you know, interesting, having just like two characters.

Adam (56:26.998)
Yeah. And…

Yeah.

Ste (56:32.446)
Well, this isn’t that interesting, but even busier than this. I’d go for, wait. Let me add a nice gradient to this.

Adam (56:45.266)
Just playing with this a bit.

Ste (56:47.579)
Yeah, of course.

Adam (56:48.526)
to see if like we are.

Ste (56:55.714)
So hold the way to 100. OK.

Ste (57:07.898)
Now we can do this.

Ste (57:12.615)
This is a good layout.

Adam (57:16.971)
Yeah, um…

Yeah, something like that could be good. I think I could even go with the text even being like a little farther down with less, like, maybe, yeah. Because then we don’t have to do the gradient. We can like showcase the image in kind of all its glory. I think.

Ste (57:23.515)
Mm-hmm.

Ste (57:30.707)
Less overlap.

Ste (57:41.378)
Okay, yeah, we can do that. So maybe we can.

just do this and have the cover overlap it a bit, and then just play with the spacing.

Adam (57:56.48)
Yeah.

Adam (58:00.726)
Yeah, something.

Adam (58:04.746)
Something like that.

Ste (58:06.458)
or if the cover is here, we can just leave the cover there. And that’s it.

Adam (58:15.318)
Yeah, I’m thinking like, yeah.

Adam (58:21.214)
Yeah, it’s a tricky one because we could make this the largest cover.

Ste (58:31.134)
Oh yeah.

Oh, the one we had wasn’t the largest. Here we go. Now we’ve got the largest one. There’s all things.

Ste (58:51.906)
Yeah, that doesn’t look too bad.

Adam (58:53.862)
Yeah, it’s looking, it’s, it’s kind of looking like a number three, but like without the, the two to 10.

Ste (59:01.978)
Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, that’s… we could have actually just copied that.

Adam (59:08.811)
It’s funny how like, you know, creative process just kind of gets there in different ways. Yeah. I’ll, well, I think that’s probably a good place to call it for today, but I feel like we’re making good progress on this.

Ste (59:12.296)
No, yeah. Exactly.

Ste (59:26.25)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we’ve only got to like, clean these up and then actually code them. And I think once we get the data and also waiting for community submissions on that doc that Jeff shared in the librarians channel, maybe we, after the librarians have a pass at it, maybe we can even share it in other more general channels for the wider audiences as well. Let’s see.

You know what we get if anyone in the chat wants to participate Let us know and we’ll send you the link if you’re not a librarian yet And yeah, this is gonna come out

Adam (01:00:11.555)
I’ll share it in this chat and then for those that are on the live. Yeah. Um, um, but yeah.

Ste (01:00:14.802)
Ah, perfect. Here we go. Yeah, there’s gonna be like some really interesting sections in there. I can’t wait to like see the actual data on this. It’s gonna, yeah, and generate the images.

Adam (01:00:24.83)
Yeah. And that, and that, uh, that one has like way more sections than we’ll likely add. So it’s kind of, it’s more of a brainstorming doc than a to-do list.

Ste (01:00:36.326)
Yeah, exactly. Feel free to add anything in there. I mean, it helps us plan this. It’s going to be like the greatest Euron Books, Euron Books in Review page out there. So.

Adam (01:00:43.223)
end.

Hehehe. Hmm?

Adam (01:00:52.298)
And, and, uh, this week I’m going to start creating, um, hardcover lists for all of the, the sections in this. Um, like I’ve started creating their, their private lists right now under the hardcover account. And then when the, the year in, um, books goes live, we can make all of those lists public.

Ste (01:01:11.862)
Perfect. Yeah, that sounds great. That’s going to be a really interesting selection, and we’re going to reuse it year after year after year and make it better. So, yeah. Nice. Well, this has been a good session. I’m going to go see what’s in the kitchen, probably.

Adam (01:01:23.843)
Yeah.

Adam (01:01:27.566)
cool.

Adam (01:01:34.923)
Sounds good. Well, have a good, have a safe trip back after your, when do you head back?

Ste (01:01:41.138)
On Wednesday actually, so yeah until then I probably like be a bit on the chaotic schedule But then I’m hoping to yeah solve some bugs as well and get the designs for this wrapped but Yeah, it’s looking good

Adam (01:01:56.962)
Sounds good. Well, see you later and have a good safe trip home. Bye.

Ste (01:02:02.046)
Yeah, perfect. Thanks so much. See ya. Yeah, everyone.