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.

The alternatives can be filtered by license or operating system. It would for instance be possible to show only free software alternatives for the Windows operating system. Additional tabs are available that display user comments, ratings and Twitter information. The alternatives listed for Adobe Photoshop include GIMP, Paint.net, Pixlr and Picnik among others. The profile page provides comfortable means to view user opinion on software alternatives for a specific program with the option to visit the website of the developer for further information or downloads.

The main page can be filtered by operating system as well to narrow down the choices. The applications that are listed on those pages can also be viewed by most popular, most views, recent and those without alternative. The service offers an easily accessible way of discovering new applications for a selected operating system.

Update: The service has recently been redesigned. It displays a list of popular and new services on the homepage with possibilities to click on those service to open the service’s or program’s profile page on Alternative To. Alternatives are especially listed for popular programs, websites and services. Many lesser known products do not even have a profile page on the website.

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.