Book Lamp

One of the things that I am really interested in is searching. Mainly something that allows me to find what I want in a reliable way. Some of my future posts will elaborate on this some more, but for now, let me share something that I found via Digg.

Book Lamp is a service that is attempting to improve searching for books. For me, choosing a book is a very long and arduous process. Before the Internet, I would literally visit the bookstore and look over a book 5-6 times before I actually decided to buy it. Nowadays, I have started to borrow books from the library, but I still agonize over choosing the right book. I hated wasting money on a book I might not like and I also found that I hated wasting my time reading a book that I didn't like either (duh....but I really really hated it). I would spend hours looking on book recommendation sites and Amazon user ratings to find a book that I might like. Book Lamp seems like it could be the solution that I'm looking for.

BookLamp.org is a system for matching readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music.

They use some sort of algorithms to analyze the authors writing styles. I believe the algorithms look at the actual text of the books. They then match this up with things that you like and offer a list of recommendations. Future versions will also include matching of story lines, probably genres, and maybe even character types to the search parameters. It will also allow you to customize your preferences and will have some self-learning capabilities. The point, for me, is that they are doing this in a cool scientific way that will hopefully give me the next book that I'm going to read. That's way cool!!!

Book Lamp is in the very early beta stages but I'm going to be watching what they do and will be participating in their forums. I'll report back on progress.....or better yet, check it out for yourself.