What Should I Read Next is an online service that can suggest new books to read from a single book title entered into the form on the service’s website. The book recommendation service works with book titles and ISBN.

If the book title is not precise enough a list of possible matches is displayed of which one needs to be selected by the user of the recommendation service.

This will then lead to the loading of the result’s page that lists book authors and titles that are related to the book entered.

It is obviously difficulty to judge a book by its author and title alone. The service links to the book’s pages at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk where the site visitor can get additional information about the selected book. This is without doubt linked to an Amazon affiliate account.

It would have been nice of the service would provide a short description of each title in the results which would make the selection process easier.

The results are not always that related. If you search for the Holy Bible for instance you are presented with results that include stories by Edgar Allan Por or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which are not related to the search.

What Should I Read Next might still be an interesting service for some users who have enough time to look through the result’s listing.

A similar service is Taste Kid which is not limited to books but provides recommendations for music and movies as well.

Taste Kid (via Genbeta) concentrates on books, movies and music which is something that I have not seen that often yet. Normally it’s only one of the three and not all of them. The website consists of a form where the user can enter something that he likes that relates to books, music or movies. This can be an artist or a name of a product.

Taste Kid will then pull data from the database and display recommendations based on the user’s input. If you enter 24 (the TV series) for example you get recommendations for Lost and The Office among others.

One interesting aspect of the website is that you do get recommendations for books and music as well if you entered for example a movie title. This does not happen all of the time though.

A brief description (taken from Wikipedia mostly it seems) is available for many items that are mentioned on the website and the site even embeds Youtube videos when available which is great to get a first impression of that recommendation.

Another interesting aspect of Taste Kid is that the website is not commercial (yet). You do not find links to online stores where you can buy the media directly. As of now it’s just a way to receive recommendations that include previews.

The maximum file size for this procedure is 20 Megabytes. The result of the conversion will be another pdf document with the order described before. The best way to print this document afterwards would be to print both sides of the same paper at the same time if the printer supports this feature.

If not the creators suggest to print the odd pages first and the put the turned paper back into the printer to print the even pages.

Two optional settings are available: You can limit the amount of pages per booklet from 4 to 64 and check a box if the document is from a right-to-left language.

That’s what the Book Beta Demo is trying to present. It looks pretty much like a book on a website. Readers can flip through the pages of the book, go to a specific page and even tear pages from it. Advanced features that you wont find in any real book are demonstrated as well.

Those features include transparency effects as well as a component called live Bitmapping which makes it possible to change animations on a page.

I’m not saying that this is a perfect adaption but the demonstration does come closer to the real experience than those pdf documents. I had some troubles concentrating on the contents of the book because my eyes did seem to be attracted to the page flipping mechanism.

The reason could be because it is a new way of reading or because there was not much content to read anyway in this demonstration.

Paul Coelho is a successful writer, he did write the Alchemist for example, a book that sold millions of copies. He was recently talking about this book and the distribution of the book in Russia. In its first year the book sold 1000 copies. That is not really much if you consider that Russia has a population way above 100 million. The book was also copied and distributed in Russia on the black market and Paul decided to publish the Russian version of his book on his website.

To his and his management’s astonishment the book sold 10000 copies the next year, 100000 copies the following and over 1 million copies the year after up to over 10 million in 2008. He attributes this success to the free publication of his book on his website because marketing and distribution remained exactly as they have been before.

Link: sevenload.com

Since he discovered that his books sell better when he gives them away for free on the Internet he created his own Wordpress blog called Pirate Coelho where he is offering download links for many of his books using various ways like emule and file hosts.

via Techdirt