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The technology world is full of bright ideas, promising startups, and spectacular disappointments. You never know which brand new company is going to break through to the mainstream, and which is going to fade into obscurity. BookLamp.org is aiming to be one of those great ideas that becomes a mainstay in the lives of internet users the world over. The self-described “Pandora.com for books” is a new beta project which attempts to match readers with books that will appeal to their personality, style, and preferences.

The brand new site uses a graphing system to determine key points, which they call “bookmarks,” about any given work. After scanning a book, their proprietary software determines the pacing, density, action, description, and dialogue levels of the title. Users can rate the books they enjoy and receive recommendations for other works that closely match the bookmarks of their favorite reads. Pandora.com uses a similar approach to recommend music that users will like, though they employed human musical analysts to discover the details within a song that make it appeal to any given person.

BookLamp.org features an informative video about their process and goals in scanning and analyzing books. While they acknowledge that readers reviews can help determine if a book would appeal to each individual, they argue that reviews can only consider the characters and storyline as appealing, not the overall writing style of the author. BookLamp’s system can analyzes books based on the parts of speech used, tracking the language of each scene. This gives their reviews a consistency across styles and authors that the average human reviewer cannot achieve (i.e. you might like books about seafaring, but you might despise Melville’s writing style).

The site is in early beta at the moment (even the FAQ section is not complete), so it’s difficult to give the idea an informed thumbs up or down. I did register and check out the graphs for the two books in their system that I’d read (they’ve analyzed just 179 books at present, most of which are science fiction). They hope to work with publishers and significantly expand the database to appeal to a wider audience. The idea itself is quite innovative, and if they get the interface right and grow their catalogue, I can easily see this idea taking off, particularly if they reach out to social networking users. A Facebook app which allows you to search, review, and recommend books to friends based on BookLamp data could be tremendously successful.

Some might say that a software analysis is not a very good way to interact with literature, and on a wider level, I would tend to agree. After all, your reaction to any given book might be very different depending on your mood or your circumstances when you read it. For example, you might like to read Alexander McCall-Smith during a quiet afternoon at the beach, but you prefer Dan Brown’s novels during air travel to pass the time. These two author’s work have very little in common in terms of action, dialogue, and themes, but it’s certainly possible to enjoy them both. As BookLamp’s database and services expand, users will want a way to search by genre and theme so their recommendations are not only accurate, but also varied.

BookLamp is likely to get plenty of attention from avid readers and techies alike. Here’s hoping they can break through the initial hype and build a lasting success in the online world.

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

By Haley January Eckels