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> Personally I'm pretty doubtful this method will give you something you actually want to read though. I've read about 20 books per year for the last three yea

by r3bl 9y ago

> Personally I'm pretty doubtful this method will give you something you actually want to read though. I've read about 20 books per year for the last three years. I buy most of them through Amazon and always mark them as read on Goodreads in order to get better recommendations. And yet, I can't remember a single book that I have read exclusively based on showing up as recommended on Goodreads/Amazon. It's usually a word of mouth, some researching, and a couple of classics I've never gotten around to from time to time (currently finishing Fahrenheit 451 for example). At best, the recommendations end up on my to-read list, usually forgotten, and disappear from there too when I do a cleaning of my to-read list because it got cluttered.

syvolt 9y ago
In contrast to your experience, I've read over 150 books in the past 2 years and around 50 of them have come from Goodreads/Amazon recommendations. I assume it depends on the genres, especially with something like Goodreads. I mainly only read a single genre so it must be fairly easy for them to recommend me books.
- r3bl 9y ago
  Yup, I tend to read a lot of genres, going from highly technical ones, to the fiction and science fiction, all the way down to a couple of YA books when I need something really light just to pass my time. To make the matter even more complicated, I sometimes read books from my own region, not translated into English (which, of course, makes them unavailable on Amazon), so the algorithm would have to count those ones into recommendations too. I don't think that anyone is investing a lot of effort in solving this gigantic problem. Amazon just wants to sell you more books, it doesn't matter if you read them or not. I don't think that Goodreads has enough of the capacity to make their recommendations actually work for someone as complex as me.

by r3bl 9y ago

syvolt 9y ago

In contrast to your experience, I've read over 150 books in the past 2 years and around 50 of them have come from Goodreads/Amazon recommendations. I assume it depends on the genres, especially with something like Goodreads. I mainly only read a single genre so it must be fairly easy for them to recommend me books.

r3bl 9y ago
Yup, I tend to read a lot of genres, going from highly technical ones, to the fiction and science fiction, all the way down to a couple of YA books when I need something really light just to pass my time. To make the matter even more complicated, I sometimes read books from my own region, not translated into English (which, of course, makes them unavailable on Amazon), so the algorithm would have to count those ones into recommendations too. I don't think that anyone is investing a lot of effort in solving this gigantic problem. Amazon just wants to sell you more books, it doesn't matter if you read them or not. I don't think that Goodreads has enough of the capacity to make their recommendations actually work for someone as complex as me.