What Should I Read Next?
This week's site is What Should I Read Next?
Though the interface is clunky and the results are questionable, the idea is fun. You add a list of your favorite books and the site suggests some additional reading material for you. If nothing else, brainstorming a list of your favorite books is worth the trouble.
One awful thing about the site as it is currently set up is that when you search, you get just one result. Thus, if you search for a book with the word Love in the title by an author whose name you have forgotten, typing "Love" in the title field returns only one entry: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. This is almost certainly not the selection you were searching for. Even more distressingly, if you leave the title field blank and enter "Kurt Vonnegut" in the author field, you still get only one result: Slaughterhouse 5. It would be much more useful to display a list of Vonnegut classics to select all at once.
One nice feature is the ability to pick and choose which of your favorite books you use to generate your list each time. You can pick only the sci-fi comedy books to see what type of results you get, or you can choose to select all of your favorites for a grab bag of suggestions. I find that the results seem to be much more useful when selecting a large number of favorites. Selecting one book rarely brings up additional books by the same author, for some strange reason. It seems perfectly natural to me that if I select a Douglas Adams book that I might want to read more of his work.
Perhaps I'll write to the site with some of these somewhat-constructive criticisms. What Should I Read Next? has the potential to be something big — no, something huge. Despite my issues here, I visit there regularly, and I suggest you do the same . . . particularly if you're looking to build a reading list for yourself.
As for my issues with the site, I encourage you to read the post comments. Andrew Chapman, who is affiliated with What Should I Read Next, has posted a response to some of my complaints. It's certainly worth reading.
Related posts:
March 10th, 2006 at 09:58
Hi! I'm one of the people behind the site, and we've got to you first! Naturally we're not going to agree with everything you've said, but we're delighted you've been using the site, and thanks very much for some thoughtful comments. A couple of quick answers to your main issues:
One awful thing about the site as it is currently set up is that when you search, you get just one result
This isn't ideal, of course – but was the best compromise we arrived at when needing some way of validating people's entry. The main reason why you just get one is that there are so many different editions of many books, and we needed to channel people into choosing the same one. If you can't quite remember the title/author, it's still pretty good (it's right far more often than not, we've found) – and you could always google to find out exactly what you meant to look for!
Selecting one book rarely brings up additional books by the same author, for some strange reason.
This is deliberate – as the site FAQ explains! It's simple because it's an obvious thing for someone to try other books by an author you like – so we cut these out (plus have a weighting system) to encourage more interesting (though inevitably erratic now and then) results.
All the best! Andrew
March 10th, 2006 at 11:41
Thanks a bunch for the comments, Andrew. Much appreciated!