Posted on 9/15/11 by Admin · Comments
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Book Reviews and Recommendations From Goodreads.com
Bookish types everywhere rejoiced in March when the popular Goodreads social network, which allows users to rate and review their favorite reads, acquired the Discovereads book recommendation engine. Users of Goodreads and similar services like Shelfari and LibraryThing have been clamoring for the roll-out of an integrated rating and recommendation service, almost since the services’ inception. Despite Goodreads acquisition of Discovereads having taken place in March, it’s taken the company six full months to rollout its recommendation engine. While the turn-around time has surely been agonizing for die-hard users, the roll-out is actually quite timely considering Goodreads has actually beaten both Shelfari and LibraryThing to the punch with its engine.
Backstory aside, the real question is: Are the recommendations any good? Goodreads’ CEO Otis Chandler sure thinks so. In a review of the service by ReadWriteWeb blogger John Titlow, Chandler is quoted saying:
“With Goodreads, it's as if you combine your favorite librarian, your best friend, and a database of two million book titles into one person and ask 'what should I read next? We're the Netflix of book recommendations,”
Calling your service the “Netflix of book recommendations” is a big statement considering Goodreads user base is only one fifth the size of Netflix and is still a free service. That said, Goodreads appears to have the infrastructure in place to back it up, boasting a set of propriety algorithms which look at over 20 billion different data points, most notably the stated preferences of their 5.2 million users. And the users of their service are extremely active, apparently infinitely more so than users of the juggernaut online bookseller Amazon. Chandler notes that the Goodreads’ database has more than 174,000 ratings of the best-selling title The Help while Amazon only has about 4,400. He also mentions that while Amazon has purchase history, browsing history, and ratings to base its recommendations on, Goodreads has more data about what people actually like and dislike in what they read and he feels it’s that distinction that will truly sets the Goodreads service apart.
As an active reader, when I heard about this service I was more than excited. In the past, I’ve depended almost entirely on friends and acquaintances for book recommendations, some good, others not so much, so for me having a source of recommendations based on my own preferences in some way is pretty intriguing. I’ve had a chance to browse and use the service a bit since learning about it. I have to hand it to Chandler in that the platform itself is both visually and functionally quite similar to Netflix. The rating system is a classic 5-star rating system and the recommendations are broken down by genre. While I haven’t had a chance to fully test the recommendations, I must say that the books that were recommended to me given the 30 or so ratings I made of previous reads were quite interesting and I do plan on picking them up the next time I swing by a book store. Given my experience I would definitely say that anyone with a keen interest in literature or even surface reading should give the service a try, if nothing else it could open you to some books you might not otherwise hear about.
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