Bookscout is a book recommendation service based on what you have liked on Facebook. As such you don't have to do any work at all with it, other than to have liked some books in the past. If your friends are using the service as well BookScout can work with their recommendations as well. It says of itself "Make reading more social! BookScout will use your Book and General Interest “Likes” to scout out a hand-picked selection of book recommendations just for you. When you “Like” or “Add” a book, the book is displayed on your Newsfeed. BookScout also allows you to share books with your friends, and check out their bookshelves for recommendations. Don’t worry: Facebook spaces out your interactions with books, so you won’t be spamming your friends with every book you like. You can change your app privacy settings at any time"
via www.yournextread.com Looking for something new to read? Then you could always try Your Next Read which is pretty basic - whack in a title, author or genre, and see what it gives you. I tried Wasp Factory, by Mr Banks, which is my usual suggestion. I was offered 10 different versions (don't forget to check to make sure you're in the right country version), and I chose the edition that I'd got. I then was presented with a bunch of blurbs about the book (why? I'd already read it!) with 8 suggestions from Plath, Doyle, Voltaire, another Banks, one by someone they didn't know (quite!) and a couple of others. There were options to filter the results, options to see more books, and a chance to create a map if I registered.
It's an ok tool, but nothing that jumped out at me. Good for school librarians and public librarians though - it does non-fiction too.
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!
