What Should I Read Next Suggests Books To Read
How do you decide what to read and what not to read? The decision might be influenced by past books that you have read (e.g. from the same author or same topic), friends, colleague or magazine recommendations, advertisement, related books that are shown on shopping sitesm or by simply stumbling upon interesting books online or in a book store.
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 before recommendations for it are displayed
This will then lead to the loading of the result's page that lists book authors and titles that What Should I Read Next thinks are related to the book entered.
If you enter Fahrenheit 451 for instance, you get suggestions to read The Catcher in the Rye, We, The War of the Worlds, Brave New World, 1984, and several other books.
Each title is tagged in various ways, and it seems that the service uses these tags among other things to find suggestions.
It is obviously difficulty to judge a book by its author and title alone, but that is all you get on What Should I read Next (if you don't count the tags).
The service links to the book's pages at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk where you may get additional information about the selected book. This is also how the service earns revenue, as it will earn commission for books sold.
It would have been nice if the service would provide a short description of each book in the results, as it would provide you with a better understanding of whether it is of interest to you or not.
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 Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which are not really related to the search.
The tags can be quite useful however for exploration. Want a list of books tagged with "censorship", "totalitarianism", or "love"? Simply click on a tag to display books tagged that way.
The service lists 20 books at the most though which is a bit unfortunate.
What Should I Read Next may be an interesting service for book lovers who have enough time using it and doing research on the suggestions on top of that.
A similar service is Taste Kid which is not limited to books but provides recommendations for music and movies as well.
I just quickly tried these two sites. I found TasteKid more useful. Entering the names two favorite authors gave me a goodly list of other authors. Some I’ve read, some I haven’t but shall explore further. Putting in the name of an author on What Should I Read Next gave me a list of that author’s books only.
Thanks for the info :)
Also tried both and I like both.
Tastekid also does movies as mentioned above!
Nice suggestions, but you missed BookWhack?
I am often looking for a new book to read.
http://www.readalike.com is a cute site that gives great personalized recommendations. You should check it out!