It may generate some side-cash via the affiliate links - it would certainly be useful to us. We'll see how it goes anyway :)

The most recently mentioned list is a very good idea. I had something similar in mind, like a news-letter that would send the "most mentioned this month", so you can get the trends.

Would you find that useful ?

I think it could be useful for sure. Both a most recently mentioned list, and most often mentioned list. I'm more interested in the latter as it is more telling.

Overall I must work on making the data more exploreable, definitely.

My pet peeve is allowing to find books quoted by X, where X is some instance of someone I appreciated on HN :)

I think I will create a labs section with various experimentations like these, so people can try them out and see if it's useful.

Perhaps a combination, like a sort of TechMeme for books?

If making cash via an affiliate link is the goal, it would make sense to have the link to the user's localised Amazon site. I much prefer to buy from Amazon.co.uk as I'm UK-based so right now I'll just highlight-> right-click-> google the title and end up bypassing the affiliate link.

Well it's only a secondary goal, as I don't expect to make loads of money with it, but it would certainly be nice.

Being able to select your amazon store is planned as well (I'm in France so I totally understand your point :-)).

I choosed to ship without that though, to see if people like the site first or not. It will require a bit of work underneath to do well, things such as verify in the background if a book is actually available on amazon.co.uk, .fr etc to avoid sending the person to the wrong place.