At the risk of sounding presumptuous, since I have another one of the sites you mention, I think I need to say a couple of things.

It's a mistake to view all these book sites as somehow enemies of each other. The simple fact is, at 7% commission and an audience of 100K or so, you aren't going to be buying yachts off the Mediterranean coast any time soon. hn-books was a hobby site for me. I used it to test out a few different ideas I had about how to deploy internet apps. The only reason you keep seeing posts from hn-books is because I had a bet with JacquesM about how viable the site would be. I thought it was nothing more than a lark, while Jacques thought it had a lot of potential. So I thought doing a dozen book reviews or so would at least show traction or not. So far I'm winning the bet.

The second thing is that execution beats everything else. I spent 2 weeks on hn-books and I was done with it. No more coding, no more anything. I don't sit around and obsess over it, I don't plan all kinds of new features, and I don't worry about how it's traffic compares to others. The only thing I worry about hn-books is that it gets enough votes when I post a review to come off the "no-follow" list. And that's simply because the bet with Jacques wouldn't be fair if it didn't. A lot of you guys have spent ten times as much time as I spent on hn-books and still don't have anything to show for it. Maybe a little less thinking and a little more execution? We have a couple dozen guys with site ideas and only a few deployed? Surely we can do better than that.

So if you want to do books, have fun with it! Try some new stuff out. Do something you've never done before. But whatever you do, don't sit around planning or dreaming up how it might be great or horrible or how your competitors might do this or that. All of that is just a waste of time. Execute. Then decide if you want to keep working on your site or move on to something else.

Yes, you can do some Chinese Math and convince yourself that there is a fortune in tech books and somehow we're all in some cutthroat competition. But do yourself a favor: don't do that. You can execute perfectly and still fail completely. So worrying won't get you anywhere. In the end, a site like you want has to be for yourself first, the community second. If you start thinking outside of that, you're probably wasting energy.

Also, I would be careful about taking every comment over in that thread as some kind of to-do list. There's a difference between asking a bunch of folks to comment randomly on some neat site and figuring out exactly what you need to do to accomplish some goal. Sometimes you just have to say no.

BTW, I posted a link to hackerbooks on my blog. I'm happy to post a link to your site as well when it comes up. Just let me know. I refuse to make this competitive. This should be something that helps everybody out. I'm hoping to learn some stuff from you guys! I'm excited about all the ideas out there.

Recently I've thought that after I do the first dozen or so books, I might continue on for a while. But not because of any great business plan: I just like reading great books and reviewing great tools and talking about how cool they are. I know some people think that's pumping the tools or books, but I like 'em, they've helped me, and I'm going to explain why I like 'em. Screw everybody else. I think you have to work from inside out on this stuff. (Quite frankly, my advice to you is if you want to execute on something to make a few dollars, find something besides books. For some reason, everybody and their brother are into books nowadays. Edw is right: if you want to make money, find somebody with money who is in pain and help them, don't concentrate on scratching your own itch so much.)

Let us know how it goes!