Products · Broad category
Books
Raised as a usability problem by 26 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2008–2025), in 25 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
People raised many different problems with Books, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 25 complaints
- Skip button hidden below the fold, not obvious you can scroll2025-03-02
- Scrolling through suggested books occasionally behaves buggy on mobile2025-02-21
- Books are hard to bookmark, search, and annotate, and later find those marks2023-12-16
- Long s printed like f makes the text hard to read2023-02-04
- Must click through chapters one by one to reach a specific chapter2022-03-27
- Can't scroll or search books; only five covers slowly scroll and are clickable2021-12-11
- Readers must flip to chapter or book end to judge whether a footnote matters2020-07-28
- Search field keeps losing focus while the book opens after cmd+f2020-04-12
- Getting a large zip file from phone to desktop is painful2020-04-11
- Cutesy analogies confused the reader and made a simple concept seem hard2019-10-17
- Textbook layout is unusable for students2017-04-10
- Clicking to get the free chapter silently subscribes the user to an email list instead2016-10-15
- Subscription pop-up panel hijacks the browser back button2016-08-26
- A popup appears and the user loses their scroll position2016-08-26
- Books had omissions or bugs that made them impossible to follow2016-03-04
- Hard to read on mobile; must click tiny thumbnails to see synopses2016-01-18
- Poor typography forces constant eye refocusing and extra mental effort to read2015-04-13
- Low text contrast makes the page text hard to read2015-03-10
- Must download the book before reading it, with no online reading option2013-01-23
- Headline reads as a call to action for the search bar, but its negative wording confuses users2012-12-05
- Search returns barely related results; cannot find a title like Count of Monte Cristo2012-07-24
- The site is slow to respond for the user2012-07-08
- Inconsistent button positioning across rows makes rating or saving books annoying2010-12-25
- Can't subscribe to keyword alerts, only broad categories, flooding with unrelated books2010-08-18
- Intentional errors are confusing when the book is used as a reference2008-05-06