Haha yeah, will need to speed that up somehow. Most quotes I've seen on the web are more like vague aphorisms instead of insightful ideas.

I personally prefer (and think people will benefit much more) from the latter.

FEEDBACK EDIT: unless, I dunno, am I wrong? Would you rather see a random book cover with the generic Amazon/Goodreads description? You'd get much more variety that way.

Maybe the best strategy is to show the generic description when it's a book you haven't personally written the description for. That way you can concentrate on the books you love or find most interesting, while still providing a huge variety to your users.

Yeah I'll look into doing that. This is my ~4th attempt (after countless iterations) of book-related projects and I have yet to find a reliable API for useful book data.

Personally I'd rather see a well curated and thought out list than random books. If I want random books. If I want a random book I can just walk blindly into a library.

What APIs do you use atm?

Stick to the curated approach. That's the way to create something valuable. People will contribute if the service gets traction.

Apart from the curated excerpt, which is an excellent idea, a summary (e.g. the stuff on the back cover or on the Amazon page for the book) would be useful to give people an idea of what the book is about.

My initial thoughts as well. This is a good idea but it is thin on details.

- What is a snippet? 'Use your judgement' isn't a scalable option.

- What are the measures against abuse? How is validation occurring? (ie: how can you say a snippet is from a book the submitter claims to be)

- What books qualify? I've read some deeply technical books that contain interesting ideas that go beyond the subject matter.

- After being burned on numerous projects/ventures (one of which actually used the very database this extension now uses!), I'm not thinking of profitability and scalability right now. Best case scenario: this earns $1-2k dollars a month in donations/grants from individuals, foundations, etc. to hire a part-time contractor to get contributions from a variety of professionals, academics, etc...and maybe another part-time contractor to promote the extension to schools and libraries.

- Google Books search usually works well.

- Anything goes. I don't underestimate a layman's ability to understand (or at least somehow benefit) from highly technical work [1]. Obviously, I don't want technical snippets to be over-represented, but I keep track of snippets by subject, time period, and other metrics. I'll open up access to these metrics when it makes sense to do so.

[1] ever seen Sugata Mitra's TED talk? https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_...