Any ideas, advice and suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks.
But I can't imagine you'd ever get the kind of growth GR has gotten without the social element, because it keeps people coming back to the site.
So my question for you is: what value are you offering? If it's just "organizing my library," then you'd need to 1) find pain points surrounding library organization that are so difficult that people will pay to make them easier, and/or 2) come up with some other novel features that also do 1).
So, in other words: What problem are you solving? Who has this problem so bad they'll be willing to pay for it? How does your app solve the problem better than anyone else?
I think the reason this hasn't been done is that (like movies and music) books are so complex that it's hard to tell what someone liked about one book or disliked about another book, so it's hard to know what other books would have that same feature.
Which is why I think ML would be perfect for this - it's good at things like extracting common features, you just has to create one that can read and comprehend novels :)
Another possibility is to make it your show piece. You can use it to showcase your talent and therefore increase your potential salary. This is your best bet for now. Ask yourself, "How does this site highlight my talens?" That will get you some immediate benefits.
What's more, all the things that obviously would make money are probably already saturated by something that Amazon does.
It's a real shame.