I'm releasing BestSFBooks today:<p>http://www.bestsfbooks.com<p>I was inspired by this HN post from a few weeks ago:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2978027<p>BestSFBooks ranks science fiction/fantasy books according to how many awards they've won or been nominated for. I included all the big ones (Hugo, Nebula, etc.) and also more obscure awards that I like such as SF Site Editor's choice. Once I had all the awards in there it was easy to start creating a New Book list based on award winning authors.<p>I could tell the app was working as soon as I saw the two book lists on the home page. They're excellent!<p>The stack is virtually identical to the stuff I used to build PickHealthInsurance. BestSFBooks is built with Rails 3.1.1 (HAML, Sass, CoffeeScript). It's hosted on Heroku and MongoHQ. I used the Twitter Bootstrap CSS toolkit, which I continue to find hugely innovative and useful. As always, data acquisition and cleanup was the hardest part.<p>I've wanted to build something like this for quite a while. As my time becomes more valuable, I'm becoming less tolerant of bad books. For a laugh, check out the "prototype" that I created ten years ago - http://www.gurge.com/amd/top100<p>Please send feedback!
<i>"As always, data acquisition and cleanup was the hardest part."</i><p>I'm most interested in this piece of the project. What were your particular tools and methodologies? How long did it take you, once you identified your data sources? Any interesting stumbling blocks or problems that were solved along the way?
OK, I have to admit at first I thought there was something wrong with the site because I didn't recognize enough books... but after reading some excerpts of books off the lists, I'm psyched -- turns out I just haven't been finding the good books for a long time, so now I can.<p>Suggests:<p>* show me excerpts on-page (if possible from amzn?)<p>* allow community +1/-1 on books and generate lists based on top-rated by site users<p>* commenting, facebook or disquss, on each book<p>(little issue: Facebook "like" button on main page and book pages doesn't seem to be working -- dunno if that's facebook's problem not yours)
looks awesome! I wrote a similar site that aggregates the general fiction and non-fiction based on how many awards and lists they are on. <a href="http://thegreatestbooks.org" rel="nofollow">http://thegreatestbooks.org</a><p>I built it on Rails as well
Update - GeekWire picked it up:<p><a href="http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hunger-science-fiction-books-sparks" rel="nofollow">http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hunger-science-fiction-books-sp...</a><p>Also, thanks to webwright for the title suggestion.
Cool! Very nice.<p>I'm sort of slowly working my way through the double winners of the Hugo and Nebula (kind of a lifetime goal, I guess).<p>It took me a while to find the "Hall of Fame" for books, but that is what immediately wanted from a site like this (I don't care so much about the year-by-year rankings). Maybe make it more prominent?<p>EDIT: also, I think there's a big difference between nominations and winning. Would be cool to sort based on actually won awards, not just nominations.
This is really, really fantastic. Been a huge sf/f reader my whole life (collect 1sts of lots of favorite authors... hovering around 6000 now). I basically used to do this manually: end of the year check Locus, check SF Site lists, check Hugos... read them all.
This is fantastic. I think you should follow natbro's lead on a few things - allow disquss commenting and show excerpts of the book.<p>Also I have a series to add: Harry Turtledove's "Darkness" series. It is like 5 books, if I remember correctly. I'm at work...
Yay!<p><a href="http://www.bestsfbooks.com/b/3119/The-Children-of-the-Sky" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestsfbooks.com/b/3119/The-Children-of-the-Sky</a><p>The Children of the Sky
Series: Zones of Thought #3
by Vernor Vinge (Tor, Oct-2011)
There seems to be a really heavy bias towards relatively new SF; is this because there are more awards now than there used to be, or because you only have data going so far back?
This is fantastic! Perfectly simple and useful.<p>Only glitch I've run into so far is that the search function doesn't work. As far as I can tell, there's no type="submit" for the form.