Book Notification Newsletter: August 2024
 Welcome to the August edition of the Book Notification Newsletter, which you can also read in your web browser if you’d prefer.
First, let’s talk about the monthly contest. Last month’s question was about which authors you blindly buy their books.
You can read the full article here. Thanks to everyone who submitted their answers. We had over 14,000 responses, which was incredible.
Ten people randomly won a $25 USD Amazon Gift Card. They are:
- Cal777cap
- Dawn F.
- EllenG
- KVCarmean
- Marilyn S.
- ncapril29
- rsail
- sharonzapka
- susieq
- Tennisbum
All winners have been emailed. We’re going to mix it up and revert back to the comments contest for this month. More details later in the newsletter.
Many of you enjoyed last month’s newsletter, where we discussed “vaporware” books, and what we were doing to combat this misinformation which is spread all over the internet. That’s good – because we’re going to be discussing more of the work going on in the backend at Book Notification over the last few months.
The growth of this site has been incredible. We beta launched on January 1st, 2023, with 0 users(well, 1 – me!) and 12,000 authors on the site. Just 20 months later, we have over 85,000 users and over 54,000 authors, all audited by humans and on the site.
We are so happy about the growth, but it results in a lot more work on our end. Five times the number of authors means five times the number of new books to deal with, for example. The more traffic we get, the more authors are requested to be audited and added.
When it comes to new features on the site’s front end, most of them are bigger projects now, which require a lot of work and testing. Pages for individual books are our current priority project, but we expect it to take a couple of months before that sees the light of day.
The vast majority of the work is focused on the site’s backend, which requires modifications and improvements to handle the site’s growth, make things easier for all staff, and stamp out all the book data misinformation that is out there.
So the section in the newsletter titled “New Features” is now renamed “Site Improvements & Updates”. Within that, we’ll list any new features for Book Notification, and also give you some insights into our work behind the scenes.
A lot of our work revolves around cleaning up data issues found elsewhere on the internet. One project we have on the go at the moment is “Name Cleanup.” In short, duplicate entries of authors can be inserted into our database for various reasons due to external database sources.
The most common reason for this is very slight differences in a name, which result in books not being correctly attributed to the author on Book Notification.
Here’s an actual example: a reader wrote in to ask why we only listed one book in a series by the author J. Hollihan Clayton when there were three in the series.
Here is a screenshot from their Amazon listing:
If you look closely at the name of the author who wrote each book, you’ll see a slight difference in each:
Book 1: Julianna Hoolihan Clayton
Book 2: J. Hoolihan Clayton
Book 3: J Hollihan Clayton (No period after the J)
This is surprisingly common and can cause many data issues. You’d be surprised to see the “authors” in various databases. We’ve seen entries where the author’s name is “Die Trying by Lee Child” or “Stephen King as Richard Bachman,” etc.
Then you have sites such as Goodreads, which often list books on an author’s page simply because they share the same name as that author. I always like to use this example from the O.J. Simpson page on Goodreads:
Sorry to disappoint, but O.J. Simpson did NOT write various books related to revenue on the Channel Islands or the Chemistry of Carbon Compounds. As mentioned last month – these sorts of inaccuracies often begin on Goodreads and then spread all over the internet. They have a very poor system for dealing with authors with the same name.
We have a system in place to handle all of this, but it was something we built early on in the site’s development. So, our skilled development team created an entirely new system from the ground up, coming up with every possible variation that could constitute a “name match.”
The database team is now going through every single entry, checking if they should merge the author matches or flag them as false positives if they were two different authors with similar names.
It’s not the most visible work for you, but it is integral to ensuring the accuracy of our lists.
This is just one example of the work going on behind the scenes. Thanks to everyone who has signed up and supported us throughout the last twenty months. It’s been an incredible journey, and I’m excited about where the site will be within the next twenty.
Until the next chapter,
Graeme
Book Notification Founder
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Site Improvements & Updates
My Notes: We’re always encouraging people to send in any feature requests they want on Book Notification, no matter how big or small. The quantity of requests we get for a particular item is a significant factor in deciding what we work on next, and this is one example of that.
Many people use the “My Notes” feature to make notes about books they have read. We started getting requests from people for all of their notes to be displayed within “My Library” and the ability to search the notes. Priority-wise, this was low on the list, but we got more and more requests for it. So we’ve now added My Notes within the “My Library” section where you can see a list of your books with your notes, and search them from that page.
Automation: A large part of what we are looking at is automating work wherever possible. An excellent example of that is new books which come into our database. Thousands of new books come in every day. They get assigned to the author, added to that author’s internal “unsorted” section, and then a human goes in, verifies where the book belongs and that it’s not an alternate title of an existing book, and adds it.
We’ve now taught our system to determine what series the book should belong to and place it there automatically. This is done using various methods, such as if an external database already lists it within that series or by reading the book description and cover to find that information.
A human still has to verify that the book belongs there and is correct, but processes like that save a lot of time on any given day.
The 1970 Problem: You may see on sites like Amazon or Goodreads a book with a publication date of 1970, even though it was published in 2012. This is related to different data sources providing incorrect data or dates that don’t exist. If a database uses the “mm/dd/yyyy” format, but a book goes into it with a date like “13/33/2023”, the system doesn’t flag this as an incorrect date.
Instead, it sets the default date as January 1st, 1970. This issue affects our own databases as well.
To combat this, we have created a page listing all books with the date of January 1st, 1970, and the database team is working their way through it. It’s not the most glamorous job, but we take data misinformation and accuracy seriously.
Content Enhancement: We’re focusing more on the biographies of authors, which is essential for the site’s health.
This month, a big job in the backend was revising how that is set up and making it easier for our writing team to input data. We also had to set up two separate templates in the backend for two different types of authors listed on the site: people whose sole job is editing anthologies and people whose primary job is not an author but a celebrity, athlete, or political figure. That has now been done – and means people such as Jerry Seinfeld have a more ‘proper’ biography to reflect their life outside of the book world, although with a strong focus on their books. The writing team will be focusing on those biographies this month.
New Content Added
In addition to adding authors, we post a lot of book news and book-related content to Book Notification each month. Here are the highlights since the last newsletter:
Monthly Contest
Quality content and discussion are always beneficial for our website. This month, we are asking you to write a comment on an author’s page. It can be whatever you want. You can write about how they are your favourite author, what their best book or series is, or about an adaptation of their book. Any and all comments are welcome.
We will give away ten $25 USD gift cards to random people who have submitted a comment from the day this newsletter was published, up until the beginning of the next newsletter. Each comment earns you an entry (or ‘ticket’) into the draw, and you can enter multiple times so comment as much as you want!
The comment form is at the bottom of every author’s page, titled “Author Discussion”.
Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s genuinely appreciated. | 