Booklamp’s algorithms: A way to connect books with agents and publishers—and regular readers?

By David Rothman

Doubt the the book biz is dysfunctional? Borders, the troubled book chain, could be for sale—just one more sign of the mess the industry is in.

That might not be the best news for something already on sale, at Borders: the Sony Reader.

Algorithms ahead?

But could p- and e-books alike fare better if algorithms could help books find the right readers, just as Pandora.com does for music?

What if a publisher could break down the storyline and plot, characters and writing style of a manuscript and see how it stacked up against the elements in an already-successful book?

BookLamp as a connector

An experimental service called BookLamp will consider those elements and more, and potentially help agent, publishers and regular readers find the right titles. See above video. The second video shows the main guy, Aaron Stanton, giving his pitch. Interesting that he’s using multimedia, eh? Says something about about all the competition that text is getting, no? Yes, the TeleBlog pleads guilty to a similar sin, if that is one.

BookLamp, from CanGoogleHearMe.com, is hardly a finished product. And, yes, Mike, I heartily dislike the idea of algorithms being the only way to determine what gets published. But what could be more mindless than the fixation that so many in publishing have on authors’ previous sales records? Or the helter-skelter selection of manuscripts from slush piles?

For humans, please

Meanwhile, if BookLamp gains funding and becomes a major influence in publishing, I would heartily advise authors to write for humans, not machines. If the gizmos are smart enough, they’ll catch on. Google’s search engine loves the TeleBlog despite my doing squat to write for Google deliberately.

Booklamp’s own self-description: “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.”

(Big thanks to Mike Cane for pointing me to BookLamp. Check out his Borders-Sony item.)