Add suggested reading

[eleybourn]

Based on books in catalogue

http://www.fictfact.com/ tracks authors and series' and http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ does something similar.

or possibly amazon

[Grunthos]

And goodreads makes suggestions once you have given ratings to more than 20 books. Not sure if there is an API.

[simonpickering]

http://www.goodreads.com/api but I don't see anything about obtaining recommendations in there.

[Grunthos]

I have send them a question....

[Grunthos]

And the answer is there is no API....sou you would have to send data to goodreads then use their web pages,

[simonpickering]

Well as we can already upload data to GoodReads I'd say reverse engineer their webpage code and do it that way (and also ask them to consider adding an API).

I also saw Shelfari (http://blog.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2007/10/the-new-shelfar.html), which is a similar service, but no API at all so more reverse engineering required.

Has anyone looked into the Amazon recommendations service, is this publically accessible?

[Grunthos]

Re: Goodreads -- probably not possible. My best guess is that once you have reviewed 20 or more books, they find other people in their extensive database who have similar tastes, then pick 'similar' books from their collections. There's probably a lot more (or less) to it than that, but to reproduce it would almost certainly require access to all their user data, which is unlikely to happen.

I have not looked at Amazon recommendations, but I do believe it is based on past purchases, which is less useful. They also have a "People who bought this, also bought..." feature, but again that is less useful.

Not sure we need to reinvent something that seems to be done quite well at goodreads. It might be worth putting a like to the goodreads recommendatins web pages somewhere in BookCatalogue, if the user has sent any books to goodreads. These guys have been very helpful, so I am reluctant to do anything that takes away from the revenue stream they must get by people actually visiting their web site.

[simonpickering]

I wasn't suggesting implementing the recommendation code within the app itself but rather have it automatically upload books and their ratings to goodreads (with agreement of the user) and then download/scrape the goodreads online recommendations.

Edit: I see what you're saying re-revenue stream, I wonder if there is some way of ensuring people do visit the site (they would need an account at least to upload all the data)

Some other options at least some of which will do recommendations based on a single book:

http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/books/search
http://www.gnooks.com/
http://getglue.com/api