Book recommendations based on reading history | Hacker News Reader

Book recommendations based on reading history

8 pointseasywood9 comments

I have rated hundreds of books in Goodreads and it still gives me crummy recommendations. For example, other books by the same author, or just books in the same genre with high ratings. Always the same collection of classics or things I can easily find myself. I would much rather have a service which sees a pattern in books I have rated highly in the past and surprises me with books it thinks I will like. Does anyone know of an actually good recommendation service? Surely this must be possible with today's AI capabilities.

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One of the services that I know is Shepherd https://shepherd.com. The service is like Goodreads, but it's more personalized. Shepherd is trying to help the readers to discover and share the books. I am not the author. You can read the details on https://build.shepherd.com/p/what-is-shepherds-mission-for-r....

Last but not least, this is the example of someone's favorite books https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/william-hansen.

Thank you for the kind words, super motivating :)

We just launched a new feature that lets you enter a book/author you love and see which books readers who also loved that book/author liked as part of our "3 favorite reads" of the year poll.

Try it out here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025

What do you think?

We are also building a full Book DNA app, which pulls in your Goodreads history and delivers deeply personalized book recommendations based on people who like similar books.

You can sign up to beta test it here if you want to help me on that: https://docs.google.com/forms/u/1/d/1VOm8XOMU0ygMSTSKi9F0nEx...

The first beta is coming out in late January, but it's pretty basic to start. Very early preview here as we build it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUMJ6uLNfjM&feature=youtu.be

It’s an interesting challenge. Modern recommendation systems grew powerful because of enormous amounts of instant feedback. You can capture clicks and view time on the web. You don’t get that in books.

I see three possible solutions:

1. Google approach: scrape the web for book recommendations and somehow create an ML recommendation system that’s better than Goodread’s 2. Pandora Radio approach: (semi-)manually create classifiers for books (genre, tone, character traits, etc.) and build a recommendation system with that. 3. Practical approach: find book reviewers whose opinions you trust and follow their recommendations.

I thought https://book.sv was pretty good. It was on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825733. When I inputted 5 books I liked, the recommendations were a combination of:

1. books I had already read and enjoyed before

2. books that were already on my list (either from friends or other recommendations)

3. books I hadn't heard of

That said, I haven't read a book from #3 yet, so I can't fully vouch for it, but #1 and #2 are positive signals to me.

Once you cross 100 books its all repetition. Just like HN comments.

You might try this: https://shepherd.com/my-book-dna

This is an early beta as we work on this problem; I want deeply personalized book recommendations for similar readers.

What do you think of the results?