Show HN: Vellum – An interactive list of nonfiction books reviewed by academics

Hello HN! This is a static website with a big interactive list of nonfiction books that have been reviewed in Science, Nature, and the LSE Review of Books. I like looking for nonfiction reviews in places such as these to get an idea of how well researched a book is, but going through their old posts is a bit of a pain.<p>The site is generated using 11ty from a couple of JSON files containing the book data, which I collected with the help of a few Python scripts. I used lozad.js and Isotope for lazy loading and filtering respectively.<p>I&#x27;m not a dev, so please forgive the cludgy code! This is not a product or service of any kind, but simply a hobby project I made in my free time this week. I&#x27;d appreciate any feedback you can offer :)<p>Some things I learned:<p>- I should try using LESS and SASS as my css file is a bit of a mess.<p>- 11ty deserves all the hype it gets in the SSG scene. The docs are a bit sparse for a novice like me, but I found a few fantastic third-party tutorials that I didn&#x27;t know about when I first mucked about with 11ty.<p>- Install node and npm via nvm if on Linux to avoid permission errors<p>- Web dev is hard<p>Some issues I&#x27;m aware of:<p>- Background scrolls when moving the modal (can&#x27;t figure this out).<p>- Some tags are misspelled and should be grouped further.<p>- The book covers are pretty awful quality.<p>- The site is quite large (~4 MB); I need to learn to integrate minification into the build process.<p>Edit: List formatting

I see lots of positive comments, but has anyone actually checked out the reviews or did I hit 2&#x2F;2 bad apples? The reviews amount to some meta info, often largely citing the author. There isn&#x27;t any reviewing of the science really. Or is this not supposed to be a scientific review, but just regular book reviews from people that happen to also be scientists but aren&#x27;t judging the scientific content from their professional point of view?

This is great! Bookmarked.<p>One complaint I have is the low-res cover images. I&#x27;m on a 4K screen and the cover images look really blurry. I can&#x27;t make out the subtitles of books.<p>Also, the double-click to close is a unintuitive. I&#x27;d much prefer to use the back button

Thank you, this is just what I was looking for. I like reading non fiction, but have found it incredibly hard to determine whether the contents are actually correct, since most reviews are not done by subject matter experts. I am tired of reading and enjoying psych books only to find out that 90 percent of it is misleading or untrue.

I had been letting reading slip this year, and went to see what Bill Gates was doing (his reading list has been reasonable).<p>So this comes at a perfect time for me. Thank you for sharing. I will certainly be going through your stem list.

Bookmarked! This is a great idea. I also really love the name—I had considered using it as a name for one of my projects once and was disappointed to feel like it didn&#x27;t fit. It definitely fits this project though!

This looks good and I&#x27;ll bookmark and return to it as well. Well done. The Economist might also be worth adding as a source on your next iteration (assuming that&#x27;s possible).

Nice resource!<p>FYI, you have mixed content; the images from Google Books are coming in over HTTP, not HTTPS. I had to allow it before I could see the images.

Nice site. How did you decide which books to include, or what data source did you use?

Anyone here only reads nonfiction like me? What am I missing?

This is amazing .. great work .. I am going to bookmark this

Really beautiful, too bad the covers are so blurry.