When I was in elementary/middle school I would become familiar with entire racks of books in the library, starting with the Tom Swift and Hardy Boy sections and

When I was in elementary/middle school I would become familiar with entire racks of books in the library, starting with the Tom Swift and Hardy Boy sections and then moving onto the adult scifi section. Surprisingly, you can duplicate a lot of the "see similar stuff" functionality through Amazon's recommendation engine (for new books anyway). The other things people have viewed/purchased for any given item are usually quite useful, and aren't limited by physical proximity, e.g. the Band of Brothers DVD listing on Amazon includes in its related items many nonfiction books, which you would never get from the strict categorization scheme in the library. I wish online library catalogs would do a better job of replicating this recommendation/similarity engine, because on Amazon things tend to be limited just to things that are still in print and for sale.