The team at BookLamp wants to make finding new books to read a much more simple process and to accomplish that goal they have created a book recommendation engine they call Book DNA which the company says provides far better personalized recommendations than other programs that rely on marketing data for their algorithms.
At this time 20,000 books are cataloged, a far cry from the millions of volumes available on the market, however the company is still relatively new and since they must scans texts of partner publishers the indexing of books is a cumbersome process.
Once scanned the program uses story components and writing style to offer suggestions, much like music provider Pandora uses various bits of data to suggest music based on a users thumbs up and thumbs down reactions to material.
The BookLamp program varies from other programs because it doesn’t simply look at books “people like you” bought to make recommendations.
The company’s CEO tells Mashable of the programs process:
“I’ll start off in science fiction, end up in fantasy, wander over historical fiction, wander over to some western,” while adding, “There’s this easy and smooth transition between genres and meta data that is hard to do in other systems.”
At this time the program appears to only offer an online database (no mobile apps) however the program is very easy to use, allowing users to search a specific book title, author or genre to find matching books they may enjoy, while drilling down further based on categories once books are displayed and ranked based on their specific information.
Check out the engine for yourself at: BookLamp.org
