This is one of many book discovery sites that are out there, and BookYap is another in the long list. It has a database of 750,000 books thereabouts, which is a reasonable number, but nothing astonishing. You can simply type into the search box a type of book, or some keywords, such as 'King Arthur' or 'steampunk' (it only found an astonishingly low 4 for that term), 'battle of britain' and so on. It then displays the results for you, and you can then filter according to taste - short/epic, undiscovered/bestseller, ancient/brand new and for me, this is where the resource fell over with a resounding clunk.
I asked the service to find me books appropriate for a 'wizard', which is one of their preset categories, and it popped up with a few examples for me. It seems to think that 'Interview with a Vampire' is ancient, and that Gormenghast isn't an epic. Not quite what I was expecting. There's also an odd mixture of fact and fiction - though to be fair once you've got a selection available you can filter on that, but I'd have thought that might come right at the start.
However, once I clicked on a title the system picked itself up and dusted itself down, and I was able to see a good page of information - nice summary, good listing of reviews, other similar books that I'd like, a tag cloud and so on. But the service teeters and crashes again, because the reviews all come from Amazon. So in reality, this is little more than a wrapper for Amazon, and Amazon.com as well, so it's of no use to me at all.
Thanks, but I think I'll stick to vanilla Amazon if it's all the same, and I suggest you do likewise. Or try something like Whichbook.net which is actually worth your while!
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