I also like https://shepherd.com/. One of its interesting features is that authors list their five favorite books and say why they like them.
A visual book recommender
11–20 of 57 posts
Re: A visual book recommender
#12Nice article. Not what I was expecting...
I was really hoping this would address "Visual Book" like in ふしぎの海のナディア, Fushigi no Umi no Nadia/The Secret of Blue Water. The LaserDiscs used to say "Visual Book" in every episode.
Great animated series (to me), a mix of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the Illuminati.
Do NOT watch it with the english subs. Suffer with the Japanese, even if You don't speak it. You don't need the junk verbal translation, You will still get the main concepts. And Hanson's driving is so much more manaical in Japanese.
Re: A visual book recommender
#13Love this. Bought a couple of books similar to "Midnight's Children' - author should definitely think about adding affiliate links!
Re: A visual book recommender
#14Cool visualization, but the model needs work. The closest book to "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets" is "The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners".
I have a theory (after having searched for The Diamond Age) that certain very popular books are ironically not going to be close to similar books because they appear on so many varied reading lists.
There's probably a graph theory phenomena that describes what I'm thinking.
Re: A visual book recommender
#15I also like https://shepherd.com/ . One of its interesting features is that authors list their five favorite books and say why they like them.
Which reminds me of https://fivebooks.com/, where people from a particular field are asked their top five book recommendations for a given theme. The interview format is great, and I've picked up a few recommended books along the way.
Re: A visual book recommender
#16Cool visualization, but the model needs work. The closest book to "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets" is "The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners".
I have a theory (after having searched for The Diamond Age) that certain very popular books are ironically not going to be close to similar books because they appear on so many varied reading lists. There's probably a graph theory phenomena that describes what I'm thinking.
Yeah basically what I think you're saying is that in a weighted graph, if there are edge weights which are orders of magnitude larger then the average it throws off certain models. Like nearest neighbor.
Basically just prune the top and bottom %1 of weighted edges to get an appropriate average. Would be my guess for a fix.
Re: A visual book recommender
#17I also like https://shepherd.com/ . One of its interesting features is that authors list their five favorite books and say why they like them.
Lol, I tried it out and put in one of my favorite books, "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis and it suggested me a list of "The best novels to help you understand the rich and dysfunctional."
Spot on! Bookmarked!
Re: A visual book recommender
#18I also like https://shepherd.com/ . One of its interesting features is that authors list their five favorite books and say why they like them.
Thanks for the nice mention :)
I am about a week away from launching genre pages, age pages, and filters for all those things. So on the hard-science-fiction page, you can filter to see books in a variety of fun ways and keep following your curiosity:
Image showing how it works: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com if you want to try the early preview, just tell me your fav genre and ill send you a link.
Re: A visual book recommender
#19This is an awesome visualization, I am so impressed :). I've been working on (shepherd.com) with a similar goal to try to bring in human groupings to try to determine book connections via the many angles humans bring to the table. And more serendipity like wandering a local bookstore. I really love how you have done this.
Dropping you an email in a few hours :)
Re: A visual book recommender
#20Cool visualization, but the model needs work. The closest book to "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets" is "The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners".
I have a theory (after having searched for The Diamond Age) that certain very popular books are ironically not going to be close to similar books because they appear on so many varied reading lists. There's probably a graph theory phenomena that describes what I'm thinking.
Yep this is 100% true (i run shepherd.com).
Within our data books like lord of the rings and harry potter are nearly impossible to map for "books like" because they are connected to so many other things. I am working now to fine tune our model, but it has been an interesting challenge.