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Book Army (Thanks, Mark!)
Bookarmy.com is a London-based start-up aiming to be the last.fm of books â€" and we're gathering steam on our mission to link every book and every author on earth.A month into public beta, the site's already throwing up some curious connections. Neil Gaiman and Lewis Caroll? Ray Bradbury and George Orwell? Charles Stross and Fyodor Dostoevsky? Anything goes: Bookarmy recommendations are generated by members themselves, who can mix and match similar reads from a full bibliographic database. The site also give readers space to host online libraries of their favourite books -- and compares their tastes to refine its recommendations.
Big-name authors already active on Bookarmy include 'Alchemist' author Paulo Coelho and 'Jumper' scribe Steven Gould. Publisher HarperCollins recently took a stake in the business, which should mean not just bags of multimedia on the way but potentially access to all manner of great content as the ebook revolution gathers pace!
BookArmy: a last.fm for books
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Awesome! It's a little buggy still, but it seems to be adding books fine.
I made a group for BB readers so we can swap book recommendations, if anyone wants to join. It's a bit lonely right now. link
Hmm, it seems to be having trouble saving the books I add to my list.
So is this just another LibraryThing competitor?
Or posts to this thread, even. :)
A bit buggy? Signup didn't work, finding a book didn't work during that.
Extremely buggy, it would appear, as in give up on.
It can't be a coincidence that Cory is now at the top of the Featured Authors' list :).
*SNORT* I headed on over and hit the authors page and the first thing I see is that Piers Anthony is not only five stars (of five) but their top rated author. 'Never Read a Bad Book Again' my ass. More like the premiere site for those who like creepy pedo-fetish and puns in one jolly package. Sorry Cory, but you're in bad company!
Wow, this looks great!
Shame it doesn't work in Opera.
How is this different (and not worse then) Amazon.com's customer review and recommendation system?
I just 'added' a dozen books, pressed save and lost everything I'd done. Unforgivable.
Does anyone else remember a small site from about a year ago that aimed to be Pandora for books? The site owner had written algorithms to quantify stuff like pacing of the book, sentence complexity, etc. then used this data to make recommendations.
The range of books it had built in was pretty narrow (mostly sci-fi), but after I told it a few books to start off with, it did manage to suggest an impressive proportion of books/authors that I'd already read and really liked.
Er... sound familiar to anyone? It was a cool site, shame it doesn't seem to have gained much popularity yet.
"Fahrenheit 451" - "1984"... What's strange about the Bradbury-Orwell connection?
Umm not so revolutionary is it? I much prefer (amazon run) Shelfari's simplicity and look/feel.
Okay, really showing my age here:
Does anyone remember a site from the 90s that pretty much was a last.fm for books? I think it was called Alexandria or similar. Essentially, it gave you a list of books, and you rated them, then it gave you a list of recommendations from books you hadn't read based on how other people's ratings compared to yours.
I used it back when I was at uni, and its first recommendation for me was Barry Hughart's "Bridge of Birds". It also put me on to Lois McMaster Bujold.
As a result, I was pretty pleased with it, but now I can't remember exactly what it was called, and last time I tried to find it, it had disappeared...
Anyone?
Also: Do they sort their ratings correctly?
Oh, that system of recommendations works so well: when I inputted Tori Amos, Madeleine Peyroux, Susie Ariolli and Alanis Morissette it Last-fm recommended me Aslhey Simpson LOL
LibraryThing is good enough for me!
Eh, LibraryThing or Readernaught are a bit better, I'm thinking.
Also, sites really need to stop making "gender" a required field.
It looks like BookArmy is a project of HarperCollins UK. Not that you'd know it from the site itself, which has a determinedly indie appearance. See http://personanondata.blogspot.com/2008/09/book-army-from-harpercollins.html.
Sticking with librarything.
This seems pretty cool, but what I really want to see is a last.fm for short fiction. Is there one out there?
FWIW, I do remember the Alexandria project, and it was pretty damn good.
LibraryThing has a good recommendation service, which I heartily recommend to all.
Hm. It seems my google-fu was weak the last time I looked.
Alexandria is still around, sort of:
http://www.alexlit.com/history.html
They'll apparently be returning sometime soonish.
I wonder if I'll be able to resurrect my decade old profile?
#13: yeah - good old old Library of Alexandria. Now you're making me feel old too.
Looks like they became alexlit.com, which seems to be inactive at the moment, with a goal of relaunching the site in 2008.
And yeah, Library Thing is mighty fine.
I got a headache after reading that their slogan is "Never read a bad book again" and the first author mentioned in the article is Paulo Coelho...
I'm still not convinced by that recommendation system, for anything. Don't you people get news about books, music, restaurants, shows from talking to friends anyway?
What I expect from the Internet is to get surprised, to gather a better sense of what else I'm missing; that is why I read BB, among others. LastFM and the likes would rather send me back to my rot. Boring.
I'll stick with Goodreads.
Oh no! Paulo Coelho featured in the main page, just below Cory.
I say that's a bad sign. Don't know about his reputation out there, but here in Brazil Paulo Coelho has a history of being utterly despised by literature lovers
You know, what I'm really looking for isn't another librarything competitor. They do centralized book logging pretty well. And I don't want a librarything that I install on my server all alone.
I want something like http://identi.ca and http://laconi.ca, but for books.
I want http://libre.fm not last.fm for books. Distributed websites where I can build my web of friends and trust, and those folks I that tend to give ratings in line with mine bubble up recommendations. Amazon "other readers like you" without the central monster.
If that happened, I could add my librething account uri to my boing boing profile and so could you. If you gave a cogent thought on a book, I could add you to my list of people of interest...
I'm just sayin' - another website that lets me put my list of interests on their server is cool, but what I really need is for these list sites to talk to each other. Let's see some federation and communication. Let's see librarything users able to communicate and get recommendations from goodreads or bookarmy users.
Building gateways is the winning strategy for walled gardens
Competition is good and I look forward to see if LibraryThing responds.
There are enough half-baked philistines among BB readers to list the entire Western canon. Last week we were vilifying Jane Austen. Can Shakespeare be far behind?
And the high-brow brigade comes marching in.
Suroo cartho, shamsthi BOOKARMY. Sentha rashoo silevera guthathi - siravasthi BOOKARMY. Kelkeesh. BOOKARMY, genthera navadho.
@25 -- LibraryThing is at least 70% of the way there, I'd say -- you are already able to add libraries and people of interest, and they have both member-recommendations and algorithmically generated ones. The piece I haven't looked for is whether friends' recommendations are weighted more heavily than strangers, because I get more than enough recommendations elsewhere, and my to-read shelves are overflowing.
Ugh. I rated a book two stars and it somehow showed up in my "top rated" list. With all the books that I've rated five stars, why would it do that?
I have not seen a shout-out for yet, which is what I use.
I signed up and entered ratings for 41 books. At that point, I lost the will to live with the user interface they have (4 clicks to rate a book! multiple pages for an author search!) and I don't think I'll be back.
LivingSocial's Visual Bookshelf thingy is easier to use and just as useful.
"Neil Gaiman and Lewis Caroll? Ray Bradbury and George Orwell?" They don't sound like curious connections to me.
@MATT KATZ
I agree with you completely. I would love to see a federated system, that allowed me to review books on my own site, and keep track of a list other reviewers I'm interested in, independent of anyone's walled garden.
An open format (an extension of hReview?) for book reviews would be nice to. Allowing any site (Amazon, LibraryThing, BookArmy, etc.) to pull in Creative-Commons-licensed reviews based on ISBN.
@NOLLY
I think you missed the point. It's not about features. It's about open data.
@JEFFVANCAMPEN this is what we're trying to do.
Unfortunately there's not a standard yet for reviews, we tried to implement boom (http://microformats.org/wiki/book-brainstorming) as standard for books but it's not so easy to integrate micro format on the site if you want to be SEO compatible since most Search Engine does not understand micro formats yet.
Now we got rid of the SEO guy so we're more free to do cool techie things :)
We've also been asked about open APIs, but there's a commercial problem behind this: books data costs a lot and we don't have rights to redistribute it YET.
We're working on it, we know the interface is not the fastest in the world and we're aware of many problems we have.
Unfortunately we've just 2 pairs of hands working on the project :)
http://www.bookarmy.com/people/smnbss.aspx
goodreads.com does it for me. it sounds like this new website is buggy as all get out and i get plenty of recommendations for books from friends.
I personally really like Goodreads, which somebody else mentioned above me. You can search for authors you like and the system will recommend you other books. There are also tons of book groups and interesting people to friend. I love knowing what other people are reading!
Plus, it's great for making library lists and keeping track of which series I've read or where in a series I stopped. You can arrange your books into shelves with tags and assign a status like to-read or read. It's a godsend for people like me who can read five or six books a week.
@OOSHINY
I completely agree.
Funny how HarperCollins and NewsCorp brand themselves a startup nowadays.
I think it's pretty good - it's obviously gonna be buggy being a brand new site, but it looks good and has more books on there the other book-club sites. Give it a few months and I reckon it'll be really good!
there is another similar web http://neednext.com - faster and simple.