When I started listening to English music I stumbled across last.fm, a radio cum music recommendation engine. A world of music with lots of artists and genres was opened up for me. I could search artists that played symphonic metal, and also look up artists similar to Dream Theatre. Last.fm is the only reason I have known and listened to so many artists.
I want to rekindle my love for books and reading. When I was a kid I used to read Enid Blyton, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and a few more. Later I started reading fiction stories and drama. Now I want to read up books on psychology and human behavior by authors who use story instead of scientific experiments to make their point. The problem is that I do not know which authors should I read! You see, I have not found any good site like last.fm for books which could recommend me artists like Paulo Coelho.
The sites like Shelfari allows one to create their reading history but fail to recommend books based on the same. Others have a recommendation engine but are similar to jinni.com – recommendation based on parameters such as mood, tempo, theme etc., instead of reading history. I need a combination of the two.
The idea is pretty simple actually. Infact, last.fm could almost use the same code and put one up. The main functionality of the site would be to allow people to create their reading history and suggest books based on that. To account for the changing interests, there could be an option to assign higher weights to later history than the earlier ones. Of course, the books and authors need to be tagged first. But then sites life Shelfari and others already have a lot of tag data. And then once people start using the site, they’ll start tagging themselves.
For now I am having to rely on my googling skills to find books with similar subject. I would love to discover a book recommendation engine similar to last.fm.
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