Books and more books

A few bookish links:

First, Annegirl’s got a lovely post on books she’s loved. Which reminds me, I still need to write that Amor Libris book…

Second, I came across BookLamp earlier this week. Here’s the blurb:

BookLamp is a book recommendation system that uses the full text of a book to match it to other books based on scene-by-scene measurements of elements such as pacing, density, action, dialog, description, perspective, and genre. In other words, BookLamp.org is a Pandora.com for books, based on an author’s writing style. If you match against multiple books, the self-learning system adjusts your formulas to make the match specific to your tastes.

Because the system matches books through objective data from the text itself instead of relying on social networks to generate recommendations, the recommendations are impervious to outside influences such as advertising or author popularity. It also allows you to match to a far greater detail than alternative systems. With BookLamp, you can request a book similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, but half the length, first person, literary mainstream fiction, with slightly more dialog, less description, and a rising action level across the first 10 scenes. If that’s what you’re looking for.

An interesting concept. Still very much in embryo, but if they get lots of books in their database and it actually works, then very cool, say I.

Third, Wired has some photographs from the Internet Archive’s book scanning project, which feeds into Open Library. I don’t think I’d really looked at what they have, but apparently they’ve already passed 350,000 texts. Goodness. When you read the texts — say Little Women or Uncle Tom’s Cabin — you see the actual book scans, and as you click next, the pages virtually flip. Quite simple animation-wise, but turning the pages is fun. :)

Last, and completely unrelated, Jon has written about Trash Can Jenga. This has totally happened with every set of roommates I’ve had. It must be in our genes…

Yeah, the gene must be carried on that Y chromosome.

But what’s Amor Libris? The first thing that would come to my mind would be Amor Librorum.

BookLamp has a *long* way to go. Pandora is so successful because there’s so much music on it, and with such detailed breakdowns of the songs. I felt that BookLamp’s criteria might not be useful enough to get adequate recommendations.

Jon: I was thinking more “Love of the Book,” thus the singular, and I liked the sound of it more than the plural. But I agree, the first thing that came to my mind as well was Amor Librorum.

M: Agreed. The idea is cool, but I don’t know if it’ll fly.