The mathematics of books
The Music Genome Project has been dissecting songs since 2000, reducing them to a set of basic characteristics, such as the gender of the singer, pitch, and tempo. The theory is that once you know these objective details about a song, you can find – and presumably enjoy – others that are just like it.
And now Booklamp is trying to do the same for books. Its software scans pages and calculates the density, pacing, and levels of action, dialogue, and description. You plug in a book you love, and it spits out other books that are just like it. You can also specify other desirable characteristics to fine-tune the recommendations.
Here are some of our requests:
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, but with all of the characters living in my spare bedroom.
- It, but without the clown. That clown was too scary.
- A memoir, but true.
Fantastic! Being in the library field, hoping Reader’s Advisory will be a key part of my position in the very near future, things like this are exactly the kind of resource we troll the net looking for.
I’m going to go try it… Thanks so much for letting us know about it.