

BookLamp - Pandora for books - technoguyrob
http://beta.booklamp.org/

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DocSavage
It'll be interesting to see if readers like the system, because I imagine
there's a number of problems with the metrics and then establishing a good
personal weighting function. What about books that have mixed perspectives,
1st and 3rd person? Most of the writing style metrics would be far less
significant than interesting plot and good characterization. Let's say someone
liked Jurassic Park. Chances are they liked it _despite_ the slow start, yet
the structure analysis apparently recommends other books partly on a criterion
("slow start followed by fast pace") that should be _negatively_ weighted.

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.

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sah
Pandora's matching doesn't have a very good hit rate recommending music to me.
But it's okay for automatically generating a radio station, so that I don't
have to be involved in selecting every song.

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.

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technoguyrob
Indeed. I've found last.fm to be better than Pandora.

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Sam_Odio
Anyone interested in this project should read the story behind it:
<http://www.cangooglehearme.com/chapter1.php>

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technoguyrob
Actually, the way I found this is by typing "Aaron Staunton" into Google. I
was wondering if his "idea" ever came into fruition.

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paulgb
If you choose George Orwell's 1984, the #1 match is the USA Patriot Act.

It would be an impressive demonstration of the algorithm, except that it
appears to be an easter-egg.

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lacker
Could you make the site usable by people who don't want to sign in?

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.

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nazgulnarsil
music is the most shallow of all art forms. the way people interact with music
will not work when applied to other art forms.

