Wrong approach

[ashley butler]

This was a rather disappointing experience as the approach is back to front. Authors tend to write in their own particular style and we have our favourites. It would have been nice to just input an author's name and be provided with suggestions of authors with a similar story/writing style. For example if I typed "Chris Ryan" I would expect to find suggestions such as "Andy McNab".
Starting with book titles with the author in brackets as an afterthought is totally the wrong way round where titles should be the end result of searching, not a starting point.

[Daniel Bowen]

Hi Ashley,

I think you're referring to the technology demonstration - the one with the drop-down menu to choose a book to search by?

That demo is almost 2 years old now.  It represents only a fraction of what we have accomplished since then (a very small fraction - 1-3%, if that).  The approach we've taken to measuring writing style is entirely empirical; as is the process of recommendation.  We want to stay as far away from subjectivity as possible.  The video does a good job explaining the conceptual foundation of how we are measuring book content.

When a public site is up and running, the user will certainly have the freedom to search for books in as many ways as are convenient.  The authors "in brackets as an afterthought" was an arbitrary decision made in early 2008 - actually I wasn't here, so I can't really say that, but I don't think it was a big issue due to the demonstrative nature of the application.

If you were initially interested with the concept (prior to observing the demonstration), I would have to ask you to hang on for a bit.  We've been waiting so long for this stuff to go public because there're so many possibilities to help you and many other readers find books like never before.  We're excited, but the time hasn't arrived yet.

Oh, and we'll put the author's names first too.

Keep in touch,
Dan