More on numibooks.com

Dave Millington, whom I had previously only known by his FORVM handle millimoo, contacted me after I described his site numibooks.com here. He asked for suggestions.

The name 'numibooks' is hard to remember. The site itself lacks graphics (except for other people's book covers and a huge webring bottom banner.) Normally I approve of sites with minimal use of graphics but the total lack reminded me of some numismatic splogs. (I'm not going to link to any coin splogs, but one is http://www.btbfx.info/ ). Add some ugly custom banners or spring for one of the $25 custom logos.

(My coin web site, http://www.snible.org/coin also lacks a useful name. I thought about buying a clever URL or begging for digitalhn.ancients.info but I was lazy and just bolted my coin stuff onto my old web site. The coin stuff is now most of the site.)

Second problem with numibooks: no original numibooks reviews. At least I couldn't find them. For example, the April book of the month, Sceattas - An Illustrated Guide copies its synopsis from the publisher's web site. numibooks users (just Mr. Millington at this point) are entering availability and price metadata but not writing custom descriptions or even ranking the books by number of stars. (Follow-up comments can add number of stars but can't describe availability or price.)

Registered numibooks.com users can enter comments rating books. The software doesn't preserve newlines so a multi-paragraph response gets bunched up into a single paragraph.

Books can only have one category, so for example Not Kosher is listed under fakes, not 'Biblical Jewish'. There are a lot of categories, including one just for The Celator magazine! Mr. Millington must have broad interests, or many numismatist friends, if he is to rate everything from 'Sylloge Numorum Graecorum' to 'Paper Money'.

There is no way to add links to the publishers site or other web reviews.

The site has a complicted legal agreement. Sites that bind users to agreements not to reproduce content while at the site time asking users to write content for free irritate me. (numibooks.com's agreement is much better than the one for AsiaMinorcoins.com).

This mini-review sounds harsh but remember than I'm reviewing the 0.1 version of the site. All that is needed for this site to become useful is for it to have ratings that let readers know if a book is worth buying for their purposes.

I wish 'millimoo' the best of luck!