by Carla Douglas
When I worked at an independent bookstore in the 90s – before
Amazon and the big chains became a force – one of my favourite tasks was to do
the receiving. Each afternoon cartons of books arrived by courier, and bookstore
staff would open them up, record them in the store inventory,
and then put them on the shelves. It was like Christmas. It was also enormously
tempting to take them home, and we ended up buying so many we used
to joke that we were being paid in books.
At the time a number of my friends worked at the public
library. When we got together, we would inevitably talk about what we were
reading, and I was always impressed by the interesting and eclectic titles they
would tell me about. “I come across them when I’m shelving,” they’d often say. Holding
a book in your hands obviously increases the chances that you’ll read it.
Everyone uses some kind of sorting method for narrowing down
what they’ll read next. Women especially are always passing books back and
forth among friends. Friend recommendations are a key method many of us have relied on for our next read. And having a friend actually
place that book in your hands? That has to improve that book’s chances by a
long shot.
This is what the combined genius of Goodreads and Amazon has
effectively accomplished: Goodreads provides the friend recommendation and
Amazon puts the book in your hands via Whispersync or overnight delivery. What
a team.
A growing number of sites have come on board to offer
similar, personalized book recommendations. Here are a couple I have tried.
What Should I Read Next? Enter
the title of a book you like in the search box and the site will analyze and
recommend similar titles, based on their database of reader reviews. (Info on
the site doesn’t specify where they get their reader reviews.) The results are
interesting and the site does a pretty good job of producing related titles. I’m
not sure I’d use it as a way to choose a book, but testing the database is fun.
Whichbook is more
complex. It allows you choose up to four book descriptors (from a list of twelve), each on a continuum – for example, Optimistic–Bleak,
Easy–Demanding, Short–Long, and so on. The site analyzes your selections and makes recommendations from its list of titles. Read more about how their
titles are selected on the site’s About page. You can also switch the matrix to choose from various elements of character, plot and setting. This site
is also fun – I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to force it to
recommend titles in specific genres. For instance, I wondered if selecting the combination
Beautiful, Easy, Safe and Optimistic would recommend a romance. (It didn't.) Again, I’m not
sure I’d use it to choose my next book, but it’s an entertaining online
activity.
In and of themselves these are not astonishing findings – an observant bookstore clerk could draw similar conclusions over time. But the relentlessness of data collection and mining does raise a few questions. Who is it for? Do readers really need these targeted recommendations about what they should read? And won't they soon weary of all this tracking and liking and recommending and rating and being friends? When did reading become such a social endeavor?
In and of themselves these are not astonishing findings – an observant bookstore clerk could draw similar conclusions over time. But the relentlessness of data collection and mining does raise a few questions. Who is it for? Do readers really need these targeted recommendations about what they should read? And won't they soon weary of all this tracking and liking and recommending and rating and being friends? When did reading become such a social endeavor?
I'm certainly not the first to point out that "the problem of book discovery," which we hear about frequently, is not the reader's problem. Committed readers in need of a book can generally find one. No, it's the author's and publisher's challenge to make their titles stand out in the sea of books available online. So if you are an author, you are probably doing all you can to make your titles visible on Amazon, Goodreads and other bookish databases.
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| Image property of Utah State Library (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) |
Goodreads credits word-of-mouth and friend recommendations as being essential to discoverability, and obviously this is what they've replicated online. Media mentions, too, garner books and authors a good amount of attention, and there are some great author interviews out there – catch them on public radio if you're lucky, or find the podcast if one is available.
And there's also, don't forget, the old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar bookstore. If you really want to go out on a limb, go to Toronto's The Monkey's Paw antiquarian bookstore and try your luck at the biblio-mat. Read (and marvel) about it here: it's a one-of-a-kind, randomizing vending machine for old books, which, for a toonie ($2 coin), dispenses an unknown book into the hands of any avid, throw-caution-to-the-wind reader. Yes, right into their hands. Just like a friend.
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