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The art of the recommendation
Keeping up with the ever-increasing, tribble-like growth in the number of books published every year can be challenging. In his new book "How to Read a Novel" (http://digbig.com/4nbxg), John Sutherland estimates that "it would take approximately 163 lifetimes to read the fiction currently available, at the click of a mouse, from Amazon.com." So, how do you keep up? With time short and choices long, how do you make decisions about what to read next? One way to help cope with "choice overload" is to rely on recommendations.
One of the most familiar book recommendation services is from Amazon.com. Look up "The Universe in a Single Atom" by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, for example, and in addition to seeing a summary of the book, you get a list of recommendations under the headings "customers interested in this title may also be interested in" and "customers who bought this item also bought."
But caveat lector! Good recommendations often involve more than just looking at the overlap between two readers' buying habits. Online stores like Amazon.com, B&N.com and Borders.com use recommendations mainly as a way to increase sales and it is not uncommon to get some head-scratchers. For example, you'll probably be surprised to learn that Amazon recommends that customers interested in "The Universe in a Single Atom" may also be interested in items related to "Free Online Dating" (http://digbig.com/4nbwr).
The good news is that there are a growing number of alternatives to the automated recommendations provided by commercial sites. Suggestica (www.suggestica.com/) is a book-recommendation site whose approach is summed up by this quote from the site from Abraham Lincoln: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read." Suggestica is a place to go to find such "best friends," and the people recommending the books you "ain't read" include such biggies as Bill Gates, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Thomas Friedman, Deepak Chopra and others.
LibraryThing (www.librarything.com/) is sort of a MySpace.com for books (not to be confused with the real MySpace.com books page which also is a source for information about books http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=books) and uses social networking as a way to generate book recommendations. Users of the site catalog their personal libraries of books—there currently are more than a million unique works cataloged—and in addition to helping people keep track of their book collections, LibraryThing makes recommendations based on the "collective intelligence" of all of the individual libraries it contains. What Should I Read Next (www.whatshouldireadnext.com/) and Books We Like (www.bookswelike.net) are other book recommendation sites worth a look.
While the Internet is becoming an increasingly popular destination for book recommendations, libraries and librarians remain a valuable source for finding new things to read. Take a look at librarian Nancy Pearl's two best-selling guides, "Book Lust" and "More Book Lust," for wide-ranging and quirky book recommendations. Fans can join her "Book Lust Community" at booklust.wetpaint.com/.
And don't forget to browse the UB Libraries Catalog (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/bison/) to find books on your favorite topic. With more than 3 million volumes available, you're sure never to run out of reading material.
—Charles Lyons, University Libraries