Pandora for books?

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

For what you want, you're destined to be entirely at the mercy of other people's reviews. With music, it is easy, you tag a song with a genre, and measure the beats per minute, and simply play a random song that is in the same style. Can't really do that for books.

Conceptually, I think you have it exactly backwards.

It's far easier to create an expert system to analyse word use, language, genre elements, grammatical structure, etc, in text then it is to measure the elements of music that Panadora does. I mean, technically, I could write a thesaurus comparison function for text, I wouldn't know where to start making code figure out if a song was "guitar driven" or "family friendly."

Pandora does a pretty good job with it's choices, but really so does Amazon's recommendation system, and it doesn't use any of those sorts of data, which I think could only make it better if it did.

[bill_mchale]

Maybe I am a retro-grouch on this, but I for one sincerely hope nothing like this ever exists for books. Books might be the one aspect of entertainment that isn't market analyzed to death. In music, I wouldn't be surprised at all if some music execs are going to start planning on exploiting Pandora's algorithms to increase their hit count. We know that movies and TV are often altered to meet the desires of test audiences, even if, in the long run, it turns out to be the wrong decision.

With writing, you never know how you will react to a book until you pick it up. I like it that way.

--
Bill

[Redcard]

Originally Posted by bill_mchale

Maybe I am a retro-grouch on this, but I for one sincerely hope nothing like this ever exists for books. Books might be the one aspect of entertainment that isn't market analyzed to death. In music, I wouldn't be surprised at all if some music execs are going to start planning on exploiting Pandora's algorithms to increase their hit count. We know that movies and TV are often altered to meet the desires of test audiences, even if, in the long run, it turns out to be the wrong decision.

With writing, you never know how you will react to a book until you pick it up. I like it that way.

--
Bill

Actually, that's kinda not true. In the publishing world, books are hyper analyzed for marketing characteristics, and only those that meet those characteristics get pushed in a given quarter. Big publishers have EXACTLY formulated metrics that each book must get, and test audiences are used.

Amazon also uses its sample to purchase ratios and information pieces as a product for publishers to purchase, so does Google, and I suspect Apple will too.

In fact, books have been doing this for a long time.. even going back to the "serials" that Charles Dickens and his like published.. they would be told by the magazine publisher "Our readers say more of this, less of that, etc"

Just because we don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there

[Giggleton]

Are we talking about reviews based on how the book made you feel or something else?

These book DNA projects seem to base their recommendations on the metadata contained within the book instead of the thought patterns generated inside our minds while we read the book, limited by our tech I suppose.

[Ken Maltby]

http://www.pandora.com/corporate/mgp

"The Music Genome Project"

A "Book" Genome Project or maybe "Reading" Genome Project, would be interesting, but
who would do it and be impartial about it? (MR?)

Luck;
Ken

[SidianMSJones]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

http://www.pandora.com/corporate/mgp

"The Music Genome Project"

A "Book" Genome Project or maybe "Reading" Genome Project, would be interesting, but
who would do it and be impartial about it? (MR?)

Luck;
Ken

Hi Ken, we do it over at www.BookLamp.org, heart of the Book Genome Project.

Our blog also explores what we do in more depth: http://storytime.booklamp.org/

[Ken Maltby]

Wow, the concept is right on!

I will have to give it a real workout to see how well it is executing.

I think BookLamp.org answers a big part of the OP's question. In fact I think, for books,
you would prefer doing a search rather than having a player that automatically provided
books to my desktop.

I am being lazy, but could you tell me if a user can develop a personnel profile for the
type of books they like and search for that? It would be neat to be able to do that,
as well as search for books that match a specific book I read and liked.

Can a user have different search profiles for their "moods"/ reading interests?

Luck;
Ken

[SidianMSJones]

Ken, we are working on all sorts of features like that. Stay tuned! Glad to see enthusiasm for the project.

Edit: Sorry if that was unclear; I mean to say that for now, we don't have that sort of feature, but we are chipping away every day toward very similar things.

[Barty]

Booklamp looks very interesting, although the answers at this point seem a bit baffling

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by ApK

Conceptually, I think you have it exactly backwards.

It's far easier to create an expert system to analyse word use, language, genre elements, grammatical structure, etc, in text then it is to measure the elements of music that Panadora does. I mean, technically, I could write a thesaurus comparison function for text, I wouldn't know where to start making code figure out if a song was "guitar driven" or "family friendly."

Pandora does a pretty good job with it's choices, but really so does Amazon's recommendation system, and it doesn't use any of those sorts of data, which I think could only make it better if it did.

With music, the tone or feel is generally represented by how upbeat things are. With text, most of the tone comes from inferences and context. If you did something like assign values to words and then calculated based on how often certain types of words were used, you could get a general feeling, but it wouldn't always be accurate. Was that really a sad story, or a comedy about goths?

[Barty]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

With music, the tone or feel is generally represented by how upbeat things are. With text, most of the tone comes from inferences and context. If you did something like assign values to words and then calculated based on how often certain types of words were used, you could get a general feeling, but it wouldn't always be accurate. Was that really a sad story, or a comedy about goths?

yes. Music, of all the art form, is probably most amenable to mathematical (hence, computer) analysis. there are even programs that compose passable music. On the natural language processing side, we have... Siri. In either case, the computer is just faking it, but since music doesn't require the computer to really understand things about humans and the world, it's much more successful there. There's a reason we have many child musical prodigies, but not many 10yo literary critics.

[plib]

Originally Posted by SidianMSJones

Hi Ken, we do it over at www.BookLamp.org, heart of the Book Genome Project.

Our blog also explores what we do in more depth: http://storytime.booklamp.org/

Well, you have Eric Flint (or two books of his at least). But you come up blank on David Weber?????

Are you approaching filling the database alphabetically?

[elemenoP]

The BookLamp thing is very cool, but it's nothing like Pandora. Pandora can READ MY MIND and it amazes me. Apparently I like basic rock song structures, electronica influences, folk influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony and mild rhythmic syncopation. Also sometimes extensive vamping. Who knew? It does make me laugh to see my musical taste laid out like that. That is all analyzed by computer? I thought they were employing a whole lot of musicology PhDs to listen to music all day. Darn, I guess those guys are still unemployed.

BookLamp is really only tracking the subject matter of the books. For instance, I LOVED LOVED LOVED "The Art of Racing in the Rain." When I put it in, I get a lot of recommendations about books about car racing. I could care less about car racing! In fact, I read the book *in spite* of the car racing stuff. I see that there are going to be sliders where you can "dial down" the car racing. That's cool! But then I would probably get dog books! Well I do like dogs, but I don't read very many dog books.

One of the things I loved about The Art of Racing in the Rain was the really fresh voice. I thought it was unlike any other book I have read. So how do you quantify or assign values to that?

And I ask you guys, readers, humans: can you think of another book like The Art of Racing in the Rain that is similar in tone or voice? I am curious.

eP

[ApK]

Originally Posted by elemenoP

Apparently I like basic rock song structures, electronica influences, folk influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony and mild rhythmic syncopation. Also sometimes extensive vamping. Who knew?

You should come to my guitar jam sometime!
I see those terms on my Pandora Bruce Springsteen channel lot. What's channel seed did you use?

[elemenoP]

Ha ha, maybe I will! My channel is based on Ringside/The Raconteurs/The Black Keys.

eP