Whoever Builds A Good Tool To Help Us Find New Books To Read Will Get Rich. (Paid Content, 3/7/2011)
Excerpt: The race to build this better discovery tool for readers is not only on—it is crowded. For the companies leaning hard on engineering, like Discoverreads [Thank you for your interest in Discovereads; however, we are not taking any new members at this time] and WhatShouldIReadNext [OMG, look at these pathetic results], book data from the user (usually beginning with books they’ve already read/liked)) is crunched against preference patterns created by other users and run though a proprietary algorithm. Others services create a social experience around reading itself (BookGlutton with online annotation, Copia with discussion while reading or afterwards), and view discovery as a secondary benefit of participation. More general recommendation services like LivingSocial and GetGlue are hybrids—treating your new favorite book, video game or beer as a set of fertile data but only good for growing recommendations when planted alongside those of your friends and extended social network.
Book discovery is as necessary for the publishing business as it is difficult for the startups to solve. Readers seek out books for four primary reasons: familiarity with the author; interest in the subject; a recommendation from a trusted source; or hearing about it through the media. But readers state their book-reading preferences via dozens of smaller criteria—price and format, genre and setting, length and likeability of the protagonist or point of view.
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