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09/06/09

All Hail The Book Seer

bookseer-1

The Book Seer is another little project we’ve just released onto the web. It’s very simple, and hopefully quite nice. Tell it what you’ve just read and it’ll suggest some stuff to read next.

It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing – at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy.

For example, I like supporting local libraries and bookshops. But there’s basically no way to get at this data. I’m really glad that The Book Partnership exists, but it’s not exactly a beacon of open data best practice, and its Local Bookshops service is slow, cludgey, and impossible to link to in useful, meaningful ways. Likewise, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s Find A Library service. There’s better data out there for libraries, but it’s mostly monopolised and ring-fenced by the Online Computer Library Centre (for more on this, see my post at Booktwo: OCLC and the Great Library Scandal).

And even many other online reading apps don’t have great ways of getting this kind of useful information out (by which I mean connections-between-books, not just the books themselves). The LibraryThing part is done by horrible old screen-scraping (sorry, Tim), and I couldn’t even make that work with GoodReads or Shelfari or Bookmooch or Bookarmy or Bookrabbit (RIP) or … well, you get the idea.

Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for their own books, and why monopolies like the OCLC exist and why things like OpenLibrary are A Good Thing (and I need to have a proper play with their API). Data should be free. Representations of that data can then be used by all, and the most successfull will Rise. That’s the idea, anyway: things like this should be easier to build.

Enough from me. Go, ye, to the Book Seer, and be Enlightened.

bookseer-2

P.S. I did use one other API – the lovely bit.ly for short URLs. I used the same PHP wrapper I wrote for Quietube, and if you like it, you can use it too: PHP Wrapper for Bit.ly API.

P.P.S. The Book Seer is in fact the late Mr Charles Lucy, distinguished artist and most estimable gentleman, courtesy of the London Illustrated News, 1873, and Wikimedia Commons.

Posted by James in Apt Studio work.

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  1. # Comment by Todd Sattersten @ 10:09 pm, June 9, 2009:

    LOVE the new site.

    You have inspired us to work on an API that can pull recommendations based on the wide variety of data we have on business books, accumulated over the last several years.

    We’ll be back in touch when we have something.

    -Todd

  2. # Comment by genevieve @ 10:56 pm, June 9, 2009:

    Allo!
    i think your Book Seer is very pretty, and leveraging the info on LibraryThing is a stroke of genius.

    Have you heard of this reader advisory though:
    http://www.whichbook.net/
    Looks pretty good too.

    Stephen Abram has an oldish list, here:
    http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2006/09/book_recommenda_1.html
    I’ll leave a comment for him about BS.

  3. # Comment by genevieve @ 11:00 pm, June 9, 2009:

    Sorry, no can do – he has closed comments. Sigh.

  4. # Comment by Jens @ 7:29 am, June 10, 2009:

    Thanks so much for this little app! :)

  5. # Pingback by Midweek Miscellany, June 10th, 2009 | The Casual Optimist @ 5:46 pm, June 10, 2009:

    [...] The Book Seer — A nice little web project from James Bridle and the chaps at Apt Studio. Tell it what you’ve read and it will suggest what to read next based (currently) on LibraryThing and Amazon recommendations. James has more about the project at Times Emit. [...]

  6. # Pingback by Times Emit: The Long Tailed Book Seer @ 1:23 pm, June 14, 2009:

    [...] or so we made The Bookseer, a fun little web app, and it went live last week. It’s really simple, but we’re delighted to note that it has seen a lot of love and quite a lot of action in its [...]

  7. # Pingback by All Hail The Book Seer | booktwo.org @ 4:29 pm, June 15, 2009:

    [...] a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data): It’s very simple. It’s just pulling [...]

  8. # Comment by Nina Chachu @ 2:32 pm, June 24, 2009:

    Like the BookSeer but I don’t seem to get any feedback from LibraryThing only from Amazon :-(

  9. # Comment by Rosten @ 1:04 am, July 16, 2009:

    I’m also enjoying Book Seer, but have the same problem getting results from LibraryThing. Is there a solution to this? I’ve found several fun new books, and would love to have the additional input from LibraryThing.

  10. # Comment by James @ 8:31 am, July 16, 2009:

    Rosten – can you give me some examples of the books that are giving you trouble and I’ll look into it.

    James

  11. # Pingback by Times Emit: A Year in the Life of a Book Recommender @ 4:39 am, April 26, 2010:

    [...] built it quite quickly, and I blogged the results after the pretty insane first [...]

  12. # Comment by Peter Collingridge @ 7:07 pm, April 26, 2010:

    Hey Matthias

    Sure! Here you go:

    Harry Potter
    1984
    On The Road
    Twilight
    Faust
    Lord Of The Rings
    American Psycho
    The Bible
    The Lord Of The Rings
    The Road
    Illuminati
    Pride And Prejudice
    Ulysses
    Wuthering Heights
    Anathem
    Brave New World
    Breaking Dawn
    Catcher In The Rye
    Ich Weiß Was Du Denkst
    Mein Kampf
    The Book Thief
    The Bible

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