Ask HN: What app do you use for book recommendations?
I’ve tried Goodreads and StoryGraph, but neither gives good recs. It seems like an easy problem to solve: just look at the authors I like, and recommend books that other people who have similar tastes also liked (ie. k-means matching). Is there an app that does this?
For example, I like:
- Greg Egan - Ted Chiang - Nabokov - Kerouac - Ishiguro - Vonnegut - Bukowski - Kundera - Joan Didion - Oliver Sacks
Surely if you get a list of favorite authors like this from a few hundred people, you could trivially recommend new authors to people?
8 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadSpecific author recommendations.
The related-books adverts at the end of many books.
Literary magazines within genres of interest.
Book reviews: NY Times, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, etc.
Catalogues. Worldcat's been considerably enshittified in recent years, but remains useful. Open Library is increasingly appropriate.
ZLibrary's recommendations tend to be surprisingly useful, though it's harder to access these days.
There was a major rewrite a year ago August. Among other things:
- The site no longer works without a JS-enabled browser. I used to be able to query the site from a terminal session via w3m or by parsing output. No longer.
- There's a lot of data surveillance going on, and at least for a while information about queries were being shared to both Google and Facebook. See: <https://nitter.net/libraryprivacy/status/1570183006689673222> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475890>.
- Some really cool data-sharing capabilities based on JSON and other data formats of bibliographic RDF triples have been entirely removed (they were broken for many months prior to the rollout). If you're interested in querying or acquiring bibliographic data for specific records ... that's become considerably more difficult.
(I believe Calibre, Zotero, and similar tools may still be able to fetch this data, I've not looked into those.)
The upshot is lower usability and accessibilty, increased surveillance, and more difficulty in sharing data with other tools / projects.
Whenever I want to save a recommendation I just add it to Pinboard, with the tags ‘book’ and ‘wislist’.
So when I feel the urge to order new books I just look at those tags and order some.
* Hacker News Books - https://hackernewsbooks.com, the weekly most mentioned books on HN
* reddit reads - https://www.redditreads.com, the books that Reddit users are reading
* Shepherd - https://shepherd.com, the book recommendations from authors, creators, and experts.
I found interesting books from blogs sometimes.
BookSloth. BookSloth is a relatively new app that uses a variety of factors to recommend books to users, including the authors they like. It also allows users to rate and review books, which helps to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. Litsy. Litsy is a social media platform for book lovers. It allows users to share their thoughts on books they're reading, and to follow other users who have similar tastes. Litsy also has a recommendation feature that suggests books to users based on the books they've liked and reviewed in the past. Basmo. Basmo is a book recommendation app that uses a variety of factors to generate recommendations, including the user's favorite authors, genres, and topics. It also allows users to create custom recommendation lists, which can be shared with other users. I would recommend trying out a few different apps to see which one works best for you. It's also important to keep in mind that no book recommendation app is perfect. Even the best apps will sometimes recommend books that you don't end up liking. However, if you try out a few different apps and give them a chance to learn your tastes, you should be able to find one that recommends books that you enjoy reading.
In addition to using book recommendation apps, there are a few other things you can do to find new books to read:
Talk to your friends and family about books. Ask them for recommendations, and tell them about the books you're enjoying. Read book reviews in magazines and newspapers. This can help you to learn about new books and get an idea of whether or not you might like them. Visit your local library or bookstore. Browse the shelves and see if you find anything that catches your eye. Attend book clubs or author events. This is a great way to meet other people who love to read and to learn about new books.
We do exactly what you described - recommending books based on collaborative filtering and comparing your tastes with similar readers. There are a few ways we make this available:
• We calculate a "match score" from 0% to 100% for you with each book that we can. A score of 100% means we're pretty sure you'll rate it 5 out of 5. An 80% means we think you'll rate it 4 out of 5. We show this score throughout the site. This is similar to Netflix's match score (but a lot more basic ). I've found it's a lot of fun to follow people, then see this score next to books people are interacting with. That combination can lead to finding some gems.
• On the "Recommendations" page we show you the books that have the highest match score for you. You can filter the books on this page by popularity. Books with more readers means the Match Score will be more accurate.
• On every books page, we show "ratings by similar readers" and "reviews by similar readers". This gives you a quick way to see what other readers with similar taste think of each book.
• We have a Readers Page to find which readers have the closest taste to you. You can follow them if you want to see what they're reading.
We have all the same tracking you'd expect from GR/SG - tracking what you read, dates, stats, a feed of friend activity, private/followers-only books (in case you want to not have everything public) and a lot more.
If you join, I invite you to jump on our Discord and say hi!
Adam https://hardcover.app/@adam