Music lovers should be familiar with Pandora’s music service, which works by recommending songs to the listener based on what the user has listened to in the past, and users will be able to help refine the recommendations by providing positive or negative feedback for the songs. Well, if you can recommend songs, why can’t you recommend books too, which is what startup company, BookLamp, has set out to do.
While current book recommendations tend to be based on the genre and type of book, BookLamp goes one step further by suggesting books that are similar in tone and nature, even going as far as suggesting books similar in page length. As an example taken from their website, “Do you like Stephen King’s It, but thought it was too long? BookLamp allows you to find books with a similar level of tone, tense, perspective, action, description, and dialog – while at the same time allowing you to specify details like… half the length.”
What BookLamp does is that it separates the book into various sections, marking each section based on what sort of imagery it gives to the user, for example “action”, or “third person narrative”, or “romance”, etc. These are what BookLamp terms as “bookmarks” which help to make further recommendation to the user. It allows users to search for books based on density level, pacing level, action level, dialog level and even on description level.
The company is still forming partnerships with book publishers, although they are planning to launch a full consumer product early August. Now I’m sure there were times when we have paid a visit to a certain section of the bookstore, looking to get a new book from the same genre, only to be disappointed. Which is why, I don’t know about you, but I am certainly looking forward to the “Pandora.com for books”. Check out the video below for more details.
Tech_Demo_Booklamp from CGHM on Vimeo.