BookLamp - Pandora for books
beta.booklamp.org
beta.booklamp.org
Pandora's music DNA matching might be more successful because listening to music seems more visceral and less cognitive than reading books. The dimension space of book recommendation feature vectors could dwarf that of music and even movies. I wonder how the system would do in the Netflix challenge by turning the analysis on the production screenplays for the films.
With books, I can't listen passively while doing something else. I'm involved in each and every book selection I make. When I'm involved, I'm already better at narrowing down my selection to things I might like than Pandora is.
It would be an impressive demonstration of the algorithm, except that it appears to be an easter-egg.
Pandora had a feature where you enter one song, and they tell you what they'd recommend. That intrigued me enough to sign up. That might be useful for BookLamp too.