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Announcing Goodreads Personalized Recommendations
Goodreads was founded with the mission to get people excited about reading. And the key to getting people excited about reading is to help them discover books that they’ll love, and then to enable them to share their thoughts and experiences with friends.
Today, Goodreads launches a new personalized book recommendation engine. It takes recommendations to a new level of sophistication by analyzing both books and, more importantly, the people who read them. It’s the Netflix of book recommendations.
Finding a great book recommendation online has been a hit-and-miss affair to date. We’ve all experienced the unhelpful suggestion to read another book by an author we already love. And how about the dreaded impact of buying gifts on Amazon only to have irrelevant book recommendations come up for months afterwards?
Earlier this year, Goodreads purchased a company that had built a very sophisticated book recommendation system. Today, after months of hard work, we’re ready to provide you with book recommendations that take into account what you like and don’t like and what certain books mean to you.
To get started, rate at least 20 books (and rate much more to get even better recommendations). Categorize your books in custom shelves that reflect what the books mean to you. Then explore your recommendations. We apologize for the impact this will have on the size of your to-read shelf.
How Goodreads Recommendations Work
The Goodreads Recommendation Engine combines multiple proprietary algorithms which analyze 20 billion data points to better predict which books people will want to read next. It maps out the connections between books by looking at how often they appear on the same bookshelves and whether they were enjoyed by the same people. On average, Goodreads members have 140 books on their shelves. With this information, the engine learns how your tastes are similar to or different from the tastes of other Goodreads members.
So, a big part of the secret sauce is…you, the Goodreads community. The Goodreads community is almost six million members strong, and you’ve added a combined total of 190 million books to your shelves!
Take best-seller The Help as an example: Goodreads members have added over 175,000 ratings of the book and over 40,000 reviews. In comparison, Amazon has, to date, less than 4,500 reviews and ratings.
But it doesn’t end with raw numbers. Goodreads members have put The Help on bookshelves called Historical Fiction, Friendship, Racism, Women’s Fiction and Cultural > African American. You can see how this book means different things to different people. If you’re approaching this as Historical Fiction and have enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, then a great recommendation for you is These Is My Words. With Amazon, the focus is on other best-sellers so someone buying The Help would get recommendations for books as diverse as Water For Elephants, The Hunger Games, and One Day.
We welcome you to try our recommendations on for size. Compare them with anything else you’ve relied on online. Then tell us (and your friends) what you think. We think you’ll be blown away, and that you’ll meet your next favorite book on Goodreads.
Today, Goodreads launches a new personalized book recommendation engine. It takes recommendations to a new level of sophistication by analyzing both books and, more importantly, the people who read them. It’s the Netflix of book recommendations.
Finding a great book recommendation online has been a hit-and-miss affair to date. We’ve all experienced the unhelpful suggestion to read another book by an author we already love. And how about the dreaded impact of buying gifts on Amazon only to have irrelevant book recommendations come up for months afterwards?
Earlier this year, Goodreads purchased a company that had built a very sophisticated book recommendation system. Today, after months of hard work, we’re ready to provide you with book recommendations that take into account what you like and don’t like and what certain books mean to you.
To get started, rate at least 20 books (and rate much more to get even better recommendations). Categorize your books in custom shelves that reflect what the books mean to you. Then explore your recommendations. We apologize for the impact this will have on the size of your to-read shelf.
How Goodreads Recommendations Work
The Goodreads Recommendation Engine combines multiple proprietary algorithms which analyze 20 billion data points to better predict which books people will want to read next. It maps out the connections between books by looking at how often they appear on the same bookshelves and whether they were enjoyed by the same people. On average, Goodreads members have 140 books on their shelves. With this information, the engine learns how your tastes are similar to or different from the tastes of other Goodreads members.
So, a big part of the secret sauce is…you, the Goodreads community. The Goodreads community is almost six million members strong, and you’ve added a combined total of 190 million books to your shelves!
Take best-seller The Help as an example: Goodreads members have added over 175,000 ratings of the book and over 40,000 reviews. In comparison, Amazon has, to date, less than 4,500 reviews and ratings.
But it doesn’t end with raw numbers. Goodreads members have put The Help on bookshelves called Historical Fiction, Friendship, Racism, Women’s Fiction and Cultural > African American. You can see how this book means different things to different people. If you’re approaching this as Historical Fiction and have enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, then a great recommendation for you is These Is My Words. With Amazon, the focus is on other best-sellers so someone buying The Help would get recommendations for books as diverse as Water For Elephants, The Hunger Games, and One Day.
We welcome you to try our recommendations on for size. Compare them with anything else you’ve relied on online. Then tell us (and your friends) what you think. We think you’ll be blown away, and that you’ll meet your next favorite book on Goodreads.
Comments Showing 251-261 of 261 (261 new)
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Denise
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Sep 25, 2011 06:48PM
I for one am really glad about it. It is a big help, and it is introducing me to books I otherwise would not have known. Thank you.
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I rated many books that I already had on my list so the program would have a very good idea of what I liked. Imagine my surprise (horror actually) when I discovered that my prior entries had been edited. All of the dates in the "Date added" column had been changed to the date I rated them to receive recommendations. I did not appreciate this feature.
Apologies if this has been raised already, but with 6 pages of comments already, I don't have the time to check them all :)I have two suggestions for the recommendations page. One, it should control for language. I am seeing several recommendations for books that are not written in English. I am sure they are lovely books, but I cannot read them, and they are taking up space in my recommendations list that could instead be filled by books I *can* read!
Two, it would be great if there were a function that prevents a book from being recommended in two places at once. I have "China" shelf and a "Globalisation" shelf, and several books are recommended on both those shelves. In effect, I am getting fewer recommendations because of it.
I'm very glad this feature has been implemented though. It's been a long time coming, and I'm looking forward to exploring it more.
It'd be nice to have a 'already read' button along side the 'want to read' and 'not interested' options. I'm getting recommendations for books I've already read (and love. Which is great, system clearly working, but I don't want to click 'not interested' and it's a bit of a faff to click 'want to read' and then move them from my 'to-read' shelf to my 'read' shelf.
Fran wrote: "It'd be nice to have a 'already read' button along side the 'want to read' and 'not interested' options. I'm getting recommendations for books I've already read (and love. Which is great, system cl..."If you rate the book in question with the stars, it will automatically be added to your "read" shelf.
Kara wrote: "Fran wrote: "It'd be nice to have a 'already read' button along side the 'want to read' and 'not interested' options. I'm getting recommendations for books I've already read (and love. Which is gre..."Ah! Thank you. I hadn't realised that, handy. :)
It's a nice idea but it needs some major work. For example: "A Book of Pagan Prayer" and anything by Starhawk, are not archaeology. Religion or occultism perhaps but certainly not archaeology by any stretch of the imagination. Connecting them to a book on the history of Pagan Europe (which IS an archaeological text) is dubious at best.As I said, it's a nice idea but there are still some major bugs in it.
Personally, this is a fabulous tool to navigate the many, many new publications every week. As a librarian, I am adding this to our blog and encouraging all of our users to try it out! Brilliant. Thanks so much!
Is there a way to update the recommendations? Some of the recommended books I may not like and want to tell the system so that it can learn.
Kara wrote: "Fran wrote: "It'd be nice to have a 'already read' button along side the 'want to read' and 'not interested' options. I'm getting recommendations for books I've already read (and love. Which is gre..."At present books I've already marked as 'read' are still recommended for my further reading. Your idea about rating the recommended books and, consequently, transferring them to the 'read' shelf doesn't work in the reversed direction.
I am a solo dissenting voice. Due to Amazon forcing Recommendations at every turn. I ignore it studiously. As a result GR is effectively forcing Recommendations on me. Thank goodness I can hide them.
