Open Library

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2009–2024), in 7 threads.

People raised many different problems with Open Library, 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 11 complaints

UI extremely slow and frustrating, user gave up on it2024-07-10
Unclear whether borrowing requires Adobe ID or browser reading; confusing access options2022-11-20
Reader controls overlap the home bar; pinch-zoom jumps pages; page slider too sensitive2022-11-20
Hard to find specific obscure books sometimes2022-03-02
Browsing forces users to drill through a Dewey-style category hierarchy to find books2020-12-23
No link from blog posts back to the main library site2020-12-21
Going back in history takes 7-8 clicks after searching on the same page2020-12-14
Can't filter search to only books available in library; hundreds of unavailable results2020-12-14
No way to filter search results to books actually available in the library2020-12-14
Search takes 20-30 seconds before any results appear, looking broken2020-12-14
Search is terrible and there is no intuitive way to browse2009-05-05