[hombre_fatal]

I once was part of a now-defunct reading forum in my teens.

On the forum, people would package three related books into quests. A boring example would be a dystopian quest pack with three books about three very different dystopian scenarios.

But the quests people put together were usually more interesting. I remember a "Weird Magic" quest had books with really unconventional magic systems. I found Motherless Brooklyn (detective with Tourette's) in a quest pack of "heroes with issues". Other quest ideas would be evil protagonists, alien first-contact with the wrong guy, and stuff like that. You can often find three books for even the goofiest of quests.

It was a cool way to find new books. And whenever you didn't know what to read next, you'd look at what quests you were still working on and choose among them. Once finished, your completed quest count would increase.

Long append-only lists of genre-related books were never as interesting to me. Quests only having three books made them a fun thing to collect. Maybe there's something fun there that new goodreads competitors can experiment with.

[randomcatuser]

Oh this is so neat!! Thanks for the idea

Anyone want this? Can have it up in March

[hombre_fatal]

It's hard to imagine ideas like this living as a stand-alone idea rather than a feature in a more general book-tracking platform.

Maybe I'm just uncreative, or maybe I'm too tempted to always generalize everything, but it seems like as soon as you implement a user log-in system for any sort of interactivity, you would then be tempted to import a book dump into your database, and the next thing you know you're now a Goodreads, Storygraph, Librarything, Booqsi, Bookwyrm, Booksloth, Oku.club, etc. competitor.

After all, most of the magic was in the community users creating and sharing fun quests and the natural curating effect of being able to sort by the most popular quests. And as you can imagine, most quests were generic and bad. "chuck123's sci-fi quest"

It was also fun to see how many quests you started by completing a single quest. Due to overlap, you'd be one book away of completing other quests, usually a book you would have never read otherwise which was part of the fun, and then you'd be another book away from finishing even more quests.

Too bad Goodreads' API is dead, else you could at least build interesting things on top of a "Login with Goodreads" button without recreating an entire platform. Kind of like how health apps on iOS get read/write access to HealthKit instead of all of them building their own pedometer and asking you to constantly reenter and update your data.

[jimmygrapes]

I imagine this sort of Quest thing could also be used to incentivize reading, ala the BookSmart program (personal pan pizzas as a reward worked quite well when I was younger). Or to otherwise gamify reading. Or... it could be a mess of trying to tie points to yet another social media account.

[booksforthewise]

Awesome, let's connect. I'm actually building a community app for book readers as well that helps with book discovery and connecting readers. Would love to see what we can do together.

Here's my email: [e-mail]

And our Instagram where we're building our community (over 50k+ book readers) instagram.com/booksforthewise

-Jeff

[shreyshnaccount]

I'm making this, but for podcasts!

[jjude]

Can you please throw more info on what you are building? Have you written / tweeted about it anytime?

[shreyshnaccount]

Havent posted publically just yet.. I couldn't find any good podcast exploration platforms or tools. Things like moonbeam are too random and things like subreddits either too inactive or too based on human recs and have a cold start problem. Its a real PITA finding good podcasts. So i figured I'll build a thing for it. The intention is to have something like a book club and what parent was saying for podcasts.

[switchstance]

Check out Fathom. https://hello.fathom.fm/

[shreyshnaccount]

Pretty cool, thanks for sharing! I took a cursory look, but this seems to miss the community element like the grandparent mentions, would make my project kinda redundant if they did though

[hsndmoose]

Lmk if you want contributors, I was looking at building something like this as well.

[randomcatuser]

Hey! Sure thing!

Google form for email! https://forms.gle/myqMroFy2nAJR4YY6 Discord where we can collaborate on it - https://discord.gg/ZwJxNtnKza thanks!

[booksforthewise]

Hey, would love to connect. I'm actually building a community app for book readers as well that helps with book discovery and connecting readers.

Here's my email: [e-mail]

Our Instagram where we're building our community (over 50k+ book readers) instagram.com/booksforthewise

-Jeff

[shreyshnaccount]

Can we add a podcast angle to this? Hmu of you want contribution

[itake]

I'd be curious about this too. where can I signup to get a notification?

[randomcatuser]

Google form for email! https://forms.gle/myqMroFy2nAJR4YY6 Discord where you can watch it get built - https://discord.gg/ZwJxNtnKza

thanks!

[Kooshaba]

I'm in, let me know when ready

[webmaven]

Sure, I'd be interested.

[citizenkeen]

This sounds amazing.

[fancy_hammer]

Sounds fun!

[notenoughhorses]

Yes

[skeaker]

That's a really fun and interesting concept! The way that quest names can be more specific than broad genres while still encompassing several books is great, because you kind of know what you're getting into without giving away the whole book. "Weird Magic" makes me want to look deeper immediately because that alone is a great hook. (If you happen to recall what the Weird Magic books were, I'd love to know!)

[JustAndy]

This exact thing happens on r/suggestmeabook, but I'm not sure it happens that often.

[nicbou]

This is a great idea. I often go on a month-long tangent of related books, films, podcasts and articles. Currently it's the space race and the war in Afghanistan. It would be cool to have "an introduction to _____" lists for this.

[Lanley]

Are you familiar with shepherd.com ? It's a site with short curated lists on just about any topic. It's still in beta, so growing

[justinberding]

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.