M
Story
Book recommendations based on reading history
I have rated hundreds of books in Goodreads and it still gives me crummy recommendations. For example, other books by the same author, or just books in the same genre with high ratings. Always the same collection of classics or things I can easily find myself. I would much rather have a service which sees a pattern in books I have rated highly in the past and surprises me with books it thinks I will like. Does anyone know of an actually good recommendation service? Surely this must be possible with today's AI capabilities.
I thought https://book.sv was pretty good. It was on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825733. When I inputted 5 books I liked, the recommendations were a combination of:

1. books I had already read and enjoyed before

2. books that were already on my list (either from friends or other recommendations)

3. books I hadn't heard of

That said, I haven't read a book from #3 yet, so I can't fully vouch for it, but #1 and #2 are positive signals to me.

It’s an interesting challenge. Modern recommendation systems grew powerful because of enormous amounts of instant feedback. You can capture clicks and view time on the web. You don’t get that in books.

I see three possible solutions:

1. Google approach: scrape the web for book recommendations and somehow create an ML recommendation system that’s better than Goodread’s 2. Pandora Radio approach: (semi-)manually create classifiers for books (genre, tone, character traits, etc.) and build a recommendation system with that. 3. Practical approach: find book reviewers whose opinions you trust and follow their recommendations.

Paste in last 10 reviews to Gemini or gpt and ask for 20 "rare-gems, unique and exquisite," with descriptions. Works well
  • hfv7f
  • ·
  • 8 hours ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Once you cross 100 books its all repetition. Just like HN comments.