BetterReads

Inspiration

As lovers of reading and addicts to social media, we receive a plethora of short-form content about books from a variety of influencers. One thing they all have in common? Complaints about GoodReads. If only there was a better alternative, one useful for both influencers and people who just want relevant recommendations and a place to organize their books / never buy a book twice again...

What it does

Scan the barcode on the back of your book to load it into your digital bookshelf and watch it appear! Click on books to add reviews and see other people's thoughts on your book. Copy your bookshelf link, and share it with your adoring fans and family. As you add more books to your bookshelf, your recommendation list at the bottom of the page will become more and more relevant.

Challenges we ran into

As we increased the complexity of the bookshelf, the formatting of the skeuomorphic bookshelf would get messed up in new and creative ways.
Designing a prompt and learning the OpenAI API was a welcome challenge.
Prisma unique constraint errors (Prisma errors uniquely)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We achieved everything we set out to during this hackathon--besides deployment.

What we learned

OpenAI API
Open Library API
How to make a barcode scanner in React
How to make a full-stack app using Tanstack Router and TRPC with React and Tailwind CSS for styling