I love the initiative and using the opportunity... what is your opinion about my recently launched project http://www.mindthebook.com and what would you change to make it a better user experience?
I think it's a good idea. Books are an appropriate answer to questions, but sometimes I might not want to read an entire book to get to the part that's relevant to me. Maybe you could find ways to cross-reference certain parts of books with questions. (I see issues with getting content rights, or having to build a referencing system that might be more effort than the value is worth.)
Questions beg for conversations to start around them. I'm not certain if this would be clouding the simplicity of your offering...but I think there isn't currently much to make your site "sticky" so the user wants to return. They come for a recommendation, maybe they ask a question, but there's no reason for them to participate further. They got their book. Discussion seems like a perfect compliment.
The other thing that could probably improve is the search experience. This might be a little harder, but you don't only want people to find their burning questions, you want them to stumble on questions they didn't know they wanted an answer to as well. This could be in the form of related questions in search, n-th degree of questions to another question, or other interesting discovery mechanisms.
Questions beg for conversations to start around them. I'm not certain if this would be clouding the simplicity of your offering...but I think there isn't currently much to make your site "sticky" so the user wants to return. They come for a recommendation, maybe they ask a question, but there's no reason for them to participate further. They got their book. Discussion seems like a perfect compliment.
The other thing that could probably improve is the search experience. This might be a little harder, but you don't only want people to find their burning questions, you want them to stumble on questions they didn't know they wanted an answer to as well. This could be in the form of related questions in search, n-th degree of questions to another question, or other interesting discovery mechanisms.
Does this make sense?