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French e-books for Canada, Polymer Vision revived, an e-book Pandora, and Brits’ wishes for a greater range of e-books
September 8, 2009 | 12:28 pm
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By David Rothman
Links of interest:
–“Music-seller and bookseller Archambault is targeting francophone gadget-loving bookworms with the launch of Jelis.ca, an online store for French electronic books”—in partnership with Sony. – New Brunswick Business Journal (via Google News Roundup, Publishers Lunch and MobileRead).
–Polymer Vision, bankrupt, is being bought by an Asian company, which apparently will focus on Readius gizmos for e-reading and back off from the cellphone capabilities. Eighty percent of the PV people will be allowed to stay on. Yes, this is the outfit with the roll-out displays; and the video shows the technology in action. How long until a Readius or equivalent appears with improved contrast or other wrinkles? Meanwhile, let’s hope that the new focus means lower costs for e-bookers. A $250 Readius ahead? (Via Google, Pocket-Lint, SlashGear and MobileRead.)
–MobileRead editor Bob Russell wisely thinks that the e-book world needs a Pandora to help readers discover the best book for them. I agree, and in fact, TeleRead in 2008 wrote up the Book Lamp service, which hopes to do just that. In the movie area, by the way, NetFlix excels at making suggestions based on readers’ past tastes—I find its recs handier than Amazon’s for books. But NetFlix and Amazon seem more interested in behavior than in the actual matching of contents—the distinguishing trait of the Pandora-BookLamp approach. Perhaps the ideal matchup with would a meshing of the two criteria.
–Paul Biba, TeleRead’s co-editor, pointed out that lack of enough device choices is reportedly hurting e-bookdom in the U.K., and there’s another angle, too—people there want more of a variety of e-books. Doubt the need for the ePub e-book standards? Case closed. The last thing the industry needs is a Betamax-VHS situation. Jeff Bezos’s insistence on the Kindle format is hurting the whole business, not just Amazon, and I hope he’ll indeed act in line with hints that Amazon will adopt a more open approach in the future.
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Comments:
Actually, you don’t need to match contents. You don’t need to cross-reference the qualities of books. Alexlit, the best book recommender I’ve ever used, didn’t have any of that.
Alexlit—short for Alexandria Digital Literature—was one of the first e-book sites (though it concentrated on selling e-stories rather than full-length e-books, since back then nobody was sure whether people would actually pay to read full-length e-books).
Its big gimmick was that it used collaborative filtering to let readers rate the books they liked, then it would generate a list of books readers hadn’t rated that they were likely to like based on what other people with similar tastes enjoyed. In other words, exactly the kind of thing you’re looking for.
When it worked, it was absolutely brilliant, and it introduced me to many of my now-favorite writers who I probably never would have discovered on my own. Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, P.C. Hodgell, Vernor Vinge, Janet Kagan…
Sadly, it went down some years back and has never come fully back. They were planning a return in 2008, but then the stock market imploded and capital dried up.
But as I said, Alexlit took no notice of genre, length, or other qualities. All that “Hypatia,” the recommendation librarian software, had was a simple five-level scale, where readers could rate how well they liked or how much they hated a book. Alexlit was completely genre-agnostic. All it did was churn the database to build profiles for each person, figure out who the other people that had the closest tastes in terms of likes and dislikes to that person were, and find what books that other person loved that the one person hadn’t read yet. Once it built up a big enough sample database of users’ likes and dislikes, it got to be pretty darned accurate.
You don’t need a catalog of book “qualities”. The “qualities” of books people like is encapsulated in their rankings. They’ll rank books that have the qualities they like higher, and rank the ones without them lower. So will other people with similar tastes—so Hypatia doesn’t need to know whether a book is science-fiction or hard-boiled detective noir or historical romance, just that your closest neighbors all loved it so you probably will, too.
Even if you read nothing but science-fiction and won’t touch historical romance with a ten-foot pole, Hypatia may well dig up a historical romance you would like despite yourself—which you would never have discovered otherwise since you don’t read those books.
Countless times I’ve been recommended books by Hypatia that I didn’t want to read because I thought they didn’t look interesting. Every single time I’ve gone ahead and read them after all, I’ve discovered a new favorite book.
I miss Hypatia so much.
I’ve heard from Dave Howell, AlexLit’s creator, that he’s working on reconstructing Hypatia in his spare time. He doesn’t know how long it will take him, but sooner or later it will be back, and you’ll all see how good its recommendations are.
(I interviewed Howell a couple years back in my Biblio File podcast. Interesting stuff.)