Don’t judge a book by it’s cover
Here’s a quick idea. It’s something that might be fun to build for a hackathon.
I love reading, and I’m always looking for new books to add to my list to read next.
While the majority of my wish list was found the usual way, book reviews, friends, mentions on podcasts, articles, or surfaced on amazon, I wonder how else I might find a new book to read.
Most discovery engines focus around the book, a description, and often a review, or many.
Firstly, the book suggestion algorithm that Amazon employs seems to work pretty well. Especially the books that other people read.
But instead of showing the books, why not take a step further, and show the writing too?
For example:
Because you read The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway
You may be interested in “Everybody behaves badly”. Here’s a popular sample:
Browsing through several paragraphs in a book, might be a useful way to decide on reading more — rather than what other people said about it, or something irrelevant like the cover art.
The other piece to solve would be how to pick out the chunk of text. It would have to be either manually curated, or maybe leverage kindle top highlights.
Next step: Prototype.