Book recommendations using Feedbooks.com

[Hadrien]

Generating books in a flexible output format, isn’t our only goal for Feedbooks. With thousands of public domain books available on the Internet, we also need ways to easily discover new books. Here’s a few ways to discover new books using Feedbooks…


Using advanced browsing

Instead of simply listing books, we offer advance options for browsing books. There’s a full help guide available for those who’d like to browse using our filters system.


Similar/Recommendations

Similar books in our PDF files

In most of our e-books (at the end of the book) or pages for our books, you’ll notice “similar books”. We identify that 2 books are similar if one of our registered user downloads these 2 books. The more these 2 books are downloaded by a large number of users, the higher it’ll appear in our similar list. More users and more downloads over time should also mean better results for these similar books.

Block for similar books

While viewing the page of one of our books, you might also notice a tab for similar books if there’s more than 5 books identified as similars. Just click on this tab if you’d like a longer list of similar books.

Tab for similar books

Based on these similar books, Feedbooks can also recommend books for every user. Everytime you add a book to your favorites, or download a book, these recommendations are updated. Favorites outweight the downloads though: while calculating those recommendations, all the favorites are used while the downloads are restricted to your last 10 downloads. These recommendations are available on the user’s profile page: there’s a tab dedicated to it on the left side of the page.

Tab for the recommendations

Both our similar and recommendations systems are constant work in progress that we’ll keep improving over time, as long as we find new ways to provide better results.

Lists

Viewing a list

For series, a common subject etc… anyone can create a list of books.
You can access these lists:

• on the main page, random lists are displayed
• on the page of a book, you’ll notice a “Listed in” element if the books is listed somewhere
• on the page of an author, you’ll notice a “Listed in” element with all the lists where his/her books are listed

These lists can be a great way to discover new books: let’s say for example that you just finished reading “1984” from Orwell. You might want to read something similar, another dystopia. You’ll notice a list named “Utopia/Dystopia” with exactly what you’re looking for.
Creating a list is the best way any user can recommend books to a large number of users.


Featured books

The team behind Feedbooks can also turn a book into a featured book that’ll be displayed on the main page of the website. These books are usually classics, or books that someone from the team really enjoyed reading. These featured books are quite the opposite of our similar/recommendation system, instead of using data from Feedbooks’ users, this list is strictly created by our team.

Featured books displayed on the main page

Dedications

There’s no better way to discover new books than getting advices from your friends. Using the “Share It” tab available for each public domain book, anyone can easily send a book to a friend with a dedication included directly in the file. A short message from a friend can make a real difference…


Social Networks

For each book/author, you’ll notice a direct link to LibraryThing in the right margin. Using such a social network, you can easily discover new books based on those you already read/loved on Feedbooks. Feedbooks is an open platform, and we’d love to work with some of these social networks in the future to provide the best experience. You can expect Feedbooks to support more and more social networks in the near future (a Facebook application for example ?).

[Hadrien]

Added a paragraph about "Lists" in the first message.
Blog entry for this post: http://blog.feedbooks.com/?p=26

[Hadrien]

Pushed the personalized recommendations to the front page: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover

A few lists available on Feedbooks were created for threads here:

• Time Travel: http://www.feedbooks.com/list/view/13
• Utopia/Dystopia: http://www.feedbooks.com/list/view/3