Beta.BookLamp.org - Like Pandora, but for Books

It’s true, reading for the sake of reading isn’t very popular anymore. Either, there’s no time or no interest. Why read when you could be watching the latest Lost, or getting up to date on exactly how much Spitzer spent on his entertainment? Nevertheless, there’s an interesting reading tool on the nets called BookLamp that might lure you back into a reading habit. BookLamp is an incredibly innovative, high tech system that matches readers with books they might find interesting. It’ll change how you find a book. How? The BookLamp tool scans books and groups them together based on similar styles and structures. There are six key factors all together, namely: tone, tense, perspective, action level, description, and dialog. So if you liked Dickens, but thought he was a bit too wordy, you can specify exactly that and BookLamp will search for something similar but shorter. So far, BookLamp contains 179 books, but is considering its next move, ie whether it ought to be open source, seek seed money, etc.

“BookLamp.org is a system for matching readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music. Do you like Stephen King’s It, but thought it was too long? The technology behind BookLamp allows you to find books that are written with a similar tone, tense, perspective, action level, description level, and dialog level, while at the same time allowing you to specify details like... half the length. It’s impervious to outside influences - like advertising - that impact socially driven recommendation systems, and isn’t reliant on a large user base to work.”

BookLamp is a cool project that’ll revolutionize how you read. It’s the most innovative way to scan and match up books. Instead of choosing, plot or even characters, BookLamp uses style and structure. It can find books that suit your needs.

What will BookLamp do in the future? How do they choose the books they have so far? What’s the best way for BookLamp to grow?