I stumbled on a new website yesterday, www.nextfavorite.com, that recommends movies and music based on your ratings of past titles you’ve enjoyed. I was surprised to see that they also do book recommendations. Not a good job mind you, but they try. I registered, went through and rated about 15 books, and then asked for recommendations. Every John Grisham book ever written popped up as ‘recommended’. Annoying because I’ve read every one of them, and even more annoying when I realized I couldn’t remember which ones had which plot and I kind of felt like rating every one of them a 3 or 4 (out of 5). Can’t remember the last time I read a Grisham book I REALLY liked, except for the first one, “The Firm”.
Some people, like Jon, think even less of Grisham than I do, but feel compelled to listen to his books anyway. Funny thing, habit. I have great hopes though for book recommendation services that actually work. Maybe this one will be it. It’s recommended ‘secret life of bees‘ to me, and although I’ve heard of the title, I would never have read the book. But now that some super-computer somewhere has recommended it, I’m off to my audiobook shelf to request it. Let’s see how good this recommendation thing actually is. If you try it yourself and it works well for you, please let me know.
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:17 pm
When I saw from my site logs that 12 people had visited nextfavorite.com from this blog, I had to check it out (the blog) myself
Yeah, that’s a fair assessment of the site. There’s a critical mass problem to overcome, particularly with books since there is such a large selection. Early customers will get some odd recommendations, for me it’s the Harry Potter series. There is real science behind the recommendations, it just takes more customers and more ratings, both of which should be resolved in the next 2 months