Announcement — Authors for every book & a fresher newsletter
Why this matters: Clearer book recommendations (with authors attached) and a weekly email that’s easier to scan and more fun to reply to.
What’s new
Authors for every book in the pipeline. Behind the scenes, we’ve cleaned up how we handle authors so each book now has a consistent set of author names attached in our index. That means fewer weird duplicates, better matching across sources, and a solid foundation for author-focused features in the future (think “more by this author” or filtering by favorite authors).
Richer weekly rankings data. Our weekly
Top HN Booksindex now keeps the full entry for each book instead of stripping fields likeauthors. This helps us keep the weekly view in sync with the underlying book data and makes it easier to add new metadata to the site without another round of backfills.Updated newsletter layout. The email got a light refresh:
- The old “💬 Tell Us What You Think” box is now “💬 What Did You Read This Week?”, inviting you to reply with the book and why it stood out.
- We’ll regularly pick a reader-suggested book to feature in a future issue.
- The footer now says “See all {{ stats.total_books }} tracked books this week →” to better reflect what the project actually does.
- Social and footer details are cleaner so the important stuff (books) is easier to skim.
Details: If you like peeking under the hood, the technical notes live in the latest Changelog.
PS: Reviews are live — if you haven’t read it yet, start with: Review — Code (Charles Petzold).