Based on the screen shot, it looks kinda random to me.
No matter what books I put in they keep recommending something called āLittle Brotherā by some doctor.
Nice idea, but I prefer it built into things Iām already using. Donāt want to have to maintain multiple lists of what Iāve read .So Goodreads is pretty good. Then again, my TBR virtual pile is huge (just shy of 300 books) so I donāt really need new suggestions. Also, rather than a random list - I do like Boing Boingās book recommendations and Scalziās Big Idea or recommendations from friends who know my tastes.
I plugged in a book published in 2002, and it couldnāt be found. So it gave me a chance to look up the book by ISBN. I got this:
I donāt know how good the recommendations will be, but I think I could have a lot of fun adding books.
I put in The Story of O and the results consisted entirely of Anne Rice, with the exceptions of what appears to be a Christian romance novel and Kahlil Gibranās The Prophet. Weird.
I enter: āLes Miserablesā by Victor Hugo.
Site recommends āMercy Watson Goes for a Rideā by Kate DiCamillo.
Now donāt get me wrong, my kids enjoyed DiCamillo in 4th grade, but her picture book about a pig riding in a car is a bit of a stretch from 18th century desolation, incarceration, hubris at the barricades and redemption at the hands of a kindly bishop. Maybe Mercy Watson is a Christ figure and Iāve been missing it all along!
I get frustrated by recommendation algorithms. For example, on Netflix if I watch a great movie with an African American lead, the algorithm assumes, āyou are black,ā and then I end up with a whole list of crappy movies with African Americans in them. If I watch a great show targeted to teens, algorithm says, āyou are 14,ā and I get recommended to watch the entire CW catalog. I watch a show with a female lead, I get āMovies with a strong female leadā as a category and a whole slew of bad movies with women in them.
Hereās the deal - yes there are genres you can skip - Iām okay with spelling that out to a machine - but I donāt really read a book about a woman because thereās a woman in it, or a book about Mormons because Iām all so interested in Mormons. I know some people like to read the same story over and over again, but I want variety in what I read.
Asked for recommendations based on āThe Martianā by Andy Weir (a sci-fi survival thriller!) and got backā¦ a lot of romance novels.
This has to be the worst recommendation algorithm ever. Is it doing anything besides matching LoC subject headings?
Did not have the same problem with Thus Spoke* Zarathustra.
* āSpakeā can fuck itself.
Got same results. Perhaps theyāre recommending the books you need, not the books you want.
I put in Mortimer Adlerās āHow to Read a Bookā, and it pointed me to a list of āBooks and Readingā.
Wow; it never occurred to me.
The fundamental failure of these recommendation algorithms is that they assume that if I read and enjoyed a book, I would want to read another book like it next. When I would most likely want to read something entirely different.
What should I read next? Probably something from the ginormous piles of stuff Iāve already purchased. Tsundoku 4 Lyfe, yo.
[quote=āChuckV, post:6, topic:50854, full:trueā]I put in The Story of O and the results consisted entirely of Anne Rice, with the exceptions of what appears to be a Christian romance novel and Kahlil Gibranās The Prophet. Weird.[/quote]Yāknow, sheās written some freaky sh!t, to put it mildly. Very mildly.
http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/reviews/beauty.htm
Meh.
I put in Neal Stephenson and got Neal Stephenson back. I put in Margaret Atwood and got Margaret Atwood back.
I know of the Sleeping Beauty trilogy. It was just odd that the list was so heavily weighted towards her work, and the two exceptions were the icing on the cake.
James Chiles, Inviting disaster - lessons from the edge of technology, nothing. Added it in so it now shows, but with no suggestions.
Richard Poisel, electronic warfare anything, nothing.
Robert McShea, Test and evaluation of aircraft avionics and weapon systems, nothing.
Vincent Dunn, Collapse of burning buildings, āSorry, there were no results - this is probably because your search edition doesnāt appear in many usersā booklists.ā.
Barbara Moran, The day we lost the H-bomb, nothing.
Richard Thompson, Crystal clear - about WW2 crystal oscillators history, nothing. Name query offers instead Jane Heller, Crystal clear, which is something entirely different.
Bee Wilson, Swindled - the dark history of food fraud, nothing.
Trevor Kletz, What went wrong, you can guess for yourself.
Charles Harper, Handbook of ceramics, glasses and diamonds, drumrolls please, NOTHING.
And thatās the lighter stuff.
Oh WELLā¦
I was interested to learn that one of the first ten recommendations for Ralph Ellisonās Invisible Man is The Book of Five Rings. Now I canāt stop thinking of the crossover fanfiction possibilities.
A lot of these recommendation engines are only as good as the people that use them. If a book is only in one userās book list, it will recommend the other books in that userās book list. I never liked whatshouldireadnext for this reason. Iāve used Your Next Read a handful of times, and found it much better. Yes, itās still going to recommend the same type of book (ie if you put in a John Scalzi book, itās going to recommend other fun sci fi stuff), but really, how else should it work? āYou like this particular genre of sci fi, hereās some more similar stuffā. Itās helped me find authors that Iād never really read much of in the past, when Iām looking for something in the same genre. If Iām looking for variety, Iāll head to some of the ābest books of the yearā lists in other genres, rather than trying to get a recommendation engine to recommend something to me based on one book that I give it.
I think I can see the logic there: Ralph Ellisonās āThe Invisible Manā -> āHey, H.G. Wells also wrote a book called The Invisible Man.ā -> āIn The Hobbit thereās a ring that turns you into an invisible man, thatās kind of close.ā -> Whatās better than one ring? Five! So my recommendation is: āThe Book of the Five Ringsā
