Really, How Hard Can Book Recommendations Be?
It’s easy to forget just how complex making a recommendation to someone can be. Not just book recommendations, but recommendations of any kind. What sort of food will they like? What sorts of movies? How about music? There are so many variables that can influence a person’s preference that it’s extremely difficult to decide which to pay attention to. And to make matters worse, it’s different from person to person, so solutions don’t always carry over to the crowd. I often make the comparison between what we do and what Pandora.com does, largely in the sense that we use a “book genome” style approach in measuring the contents of a book and matching it to a user. But to be absolutely honest, there’s a world of difference between analyzing a song that lasts for, likely, about four minutes, and a book that will take a human hours to read. For one, a bad music recommendation will likely be caught by the user in the first 30 seconds of the song, and at worst, you’ve cost them roughly four mi
