Booklamp

Today's Publisher's Lunch linked to an article on Booklamp, a Book Genome project that's supposed to do for books what Pandora has done for music.

I love Pandora. I've discovered several new artists through them--people whose music I've bought and continue to be a fan of.

In case you're not familiar with Pandora, the idea is that you put in a song or musical artist that you like and Pandora then creates a "station" based on music that is similar. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project and, per their website, "each song in the Music Genome Project is analyzed using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics by a trained music analyst." Pandora also has a feature that lets you give a thumbs up or thumbs down to songs and it tailors your station based on these ratings. Basically, it learns your preferences based on what you "like" or "dislike" and those ratings help Pandora to understand what music goes together.

Booklamp is trying to do a similar thing, which I think is super cool. I played around on their site for a while tonight. They're definitely not at the Pandora level yet, but they've got a good start.

For example, I pulled up Kelley Armstrong's FROSTBITTEN. This is an urban fantasy and the protagonist is a werewolf. Booklamp recommended several werewolf-related books, which was great. It also recommended other urban fantasy authors, like Keri Arthur. I think that's also a good recommendation. Keri's and Kelley's styles are somewhat different--Keri tends to have more graphic sex scenes and more of them, for example--but, on the whole, I would say that it's a good bet that someone who enjoys Kelley Armstrong's UF series would enjoy Keri Arthur's work.

However, I also got a western. Granted, I haven't read it, but I'm not sure that a western by Louis L'Amour is the best match for a somewhat gritty urban fantasy starring werewolves.

I also did a search on Keri Arthur's DESTINY KILLS, which is an urban fantasy about dragon shapeshifters. This brought up Keri's whole catalog--reasonable, but nothing I needed "StoryDNA" to figure out. Aaaaand THE DEAD-TOSSED WAVES by Carrie Ryan. Although I haven't read it yet, it's the sequel to THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH, which I did read and loved.

Now, FHT was YA, had to do with zombies and definitely had a literary feel. So, where's the match? Okay, DESTINY KILLS has a little to do with water and, judging by the title, maybe DTW does, too. And DESTINY KILLS is UF, and DTW presumably continues with the zombies. But I don't know if literary YA is what people are going to be looking for when looking for a book like DESTINY KILLS.

One thing I did like about their site is that when you pull up a book that you want similar recommendations to, you're given the "StoryDNA" components for that book and each one has a slider. So if the book you pulled up happened to have a plot about sailing but you don't care about that, you can drag that slider to zero but keep the other aspects of that book that you did like as part of the active search mechanism. Sort of like the thumbs up/thumbs down feature of Pandora. You can also tell Booklamp that you're not interested in a book selection.

Bottom line: It's got a ways to go but I really like the idea and I think they're off to a great start. I'm interested to see where the project goes from here.

Have any of you used it? Do you use Pandora? Thoughts?