The author did a lot of work and analysis to build this. This is not easy to do and I've found that people doing anything with books are doing it for passion, not money.

Background: I run hackernewsbooks.com, and the only thing affiliate revenue covers is the hosting and mailing list costs (~$50 a month). It is a fun project I bought from the original owner to learn (and because I loved the idea). I want to add more visuals and unique navigation to it. I also run Shepherd.com, which is a much larger book website and we are not covering our costs yet, it is a struggle.

There is a tendency on H.N. to think everything is a scam; I'd love to see that moderated a bit so that people realize it's people like them building cool stuff that excites them.

the "author" fed a bunch of text into a prompt generator and spit out a list with referral links

web 3.0 looking good

It’s still sleazy hijacking other people’s recommendations to monetize them.

I find it hilarious that you would say this when you used to work for Google :)

All Google does is hijack other people's hard-written content and slap ads around it.

I am half-kidding, as I love Google, but I think your comment lacks some self-awareness about the reality of curation and what it offers to people. And how the world is funded. I mean how much of your house is paid for from ad revenue while you worked at Google?

Google didn’t steal people’s content when I left. Snippets weren’t a thing. It was a search engine that actually directed traffic to content creators.

Google didn’t make money on the curation, they made money from the separate ads on the side. I would have no problem if the author jammed ads off on the side.

The fact that you think ad revenue is the same as adding and replacing referral links from things that people already curated is pretty disturbing.

Google entirely makes money on curation :), that is what they do. Curate and organize the web. They also sub in their own product links everywhere.

The creator of this project threw in some referral links, but he didn't replace them. And maybe he made $20 to $50 bucks for what was a huge chunk of his time to create this fun data analysis project.

Seems a weird thing to complain about.

Your comments here and elsewhere are indirectly being monetized too.

I think most people who recommend a book do it to help the world and spread knowledge and would be glad to have their recommendation reshared.

And to add, it also is a HUGE help to authors. There is a huge problem in the book industry with"winner takes all" within Amazon and other big book websites. It means we as readers are getting less and less exposed to books that we would like but fail to get noticed. The more recommendations and distribution of unique recommendations the better.

From my perspective he's putting in the work to collect all of these into one spot that is easy and fun for me to peruse (also without banner ads and other garbage on the site).

That seems sufficiently transformative to make his referral links okay.

I find the idea that everyone gets to hoard and constrain the value of their own output sleazy.

Out of all things you can "steal" I can't think of anything with less intrinsic value than the mentioning of a book title. Pretty sure no-one who posts a recommendation on a public forum has any expectations of ownership or attribution, unless they are quoted word-by-word but this is just aggregating the titles.

If I knew it was an Amazon link before clicking it, I would be 100% ok with it.

But as it is, I agree.

If you don't want to support them then don't click on the link or extract the raw link from the source? The person who made this is under no obligation to make it easy for you to use his thing for free.

But I'm also supporting them by participating on Hacker News.

Perhaps they are trying to offset the carbon emissions from their GPU use.

Funny, my first thought was: wow, what an easy way to make money — I wish I’d done this.

How much money do 50 odd affiliate links to sub 5 dollar books even make? I doubt OP is making some enviable amount of money.