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.
We need a better way to get book recommendations. Sure, Pandora messes up sometimes as well. But even when they recommend something I don't like, at least I can see why they recommended it, and start to learn for myself what I don't like. It's a recommendation method that gets into the details that matter, and shares the "thinking" with me. In my opinion, that's just what we need in the e-book world.
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Amazon's recommendations seem to be pretty good. They offer you the opportunity to refine their recommendations, too. But, their system seems to be overly influenced by recent purchases. So, as I've availed myself of almost every Kindle freebie that has come by, the book recommendations have become more skewed to those types of books. Same thing happened when my husband didn't notice that the computer was logged into my Amazon account and he ordered an album by Kylie Minogue. Took me *months* to convince Amazon that I didn't want any more of her music!
It would be nice if Goodreads or LibraryThing had as smart of a recommendations system as Amazon. (Yeah, OK. I understand that this personalization of the shopping system is one area where Amazon has it all over their competition.) Since the books I list at these sites are those I have actually *read* or those I plan to read fairly soon, the recommendations wouldn't be unduly influenced by books that I downloaded, but haven't gotten around to reading.