Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
My thought for today is that something similar should work great for books as well. Study what makes books worth reading and fun or valuable. Ask people what books they like and don't like, and why. Provide a catalog of book qualities and use it to provide a personalized stream of book recommendations that can be evolved with your additional input about books you've read. In other words, do something a little deeper than Netflix or the standard social book recommendation sites. It's all the more important for books than songs - you can waste a lot more time and effort on a bad book than a bad song.
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Actually, you don't need to get this complicated.
Alexlit, which I mentioned a couple posts up from here, didn't have any of that.
All that "Hypatia," the recommendation librarian software, had was a simple five-level scale, where readers could rate how well they liked or how much they hated a book. Alexlit was completely genre-agnostic. All it did was churn the database to build profiles for each person, figure out who the other people that had the closest tastes in terms of likes and dislikes to that person were, and find what books that other person loved that the one person hadn't read yet. Once it built up a big enough sample database of users' likes and dislikes, it got to be pretty darned accurate.
You don't need a catalog of book "qualities". The "qualities" of books people like is encapsulated in their rankings. They'll rank books that have the qualities they like higher, and rank the ones without them lower. So will other people with similar tastes—so Hypatia doesn't need to know whether a book is science-fiction or hard-boiled detective noir or historical romance, just that your closest neighbors all loved it so you probably will, too.
Even if you read nothing but science-fiction and won't touch historical romance with a ten-foot pole, Hypatia may well dig up a historical romance you would like despite yourself—which you would never have discovered otherwise since you don't read those books.
Countless times I've been recommended books by Hypatia that I didn't want to read because I thought they didn't look interesting.
Every single time I've gone ahead and read them after all, I've discovered a new favorite book.
I miss Hypatia so much.
I've heard from Dave Howell that he's working on reconstructing Hypatia in his spare time. He doesn't know how long it will take him, but sooner or later it will be back, and you'll all see how good its recommendations are.