Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Recommending books—and series

It’s frequent for recommendations to include multiple books from the same series. So I’ve changed how recommendations display, to show these and get out of the way for other recommendations.

I also added recommendations to all Common Knowledge pages, so you can see aggregate recommendations for every series, award, place, character and so forth. For series, the results can be very good. Others can be strange, but are often quite cool.

This is another example of our continual effort to “unlearn” ecommerce, especially Amazon, conventions. Real people recommend series to each other—not to mention authors, genres, etc. Stores recommend discrete objects, because that’s what they sell. LibraryThing, which strives be interesting and useful, not to sell things, can transcend these store limitations. We just need to realize they’re there.

Come talk about it here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/79301

Labels: now with series, recommendations

15 Comments:

  1. Eva says:

    Great! What a good idea.

  2. jenson_aka_dl says:

    That's great! I love and use the recommendations already and it looks like now there will be even more to choose from.

  3. Wandering_star says:

    Fantastic! I spotted this on a work page first and had to come right over here to read about it. I like.

  4. becbart says:

    Wonderful idea! Looks great.

  5. arahsae says:

    Brilliant! Thank you!

  6. adam says:

    It's frequent for recommendations to include multiple books from LibraryThing, which strives be interesting and useful.

    —————

    ADAM SMITH

  7. rarelibrarian says:

    That's so fantastic! Thanks so much for fixing that, it's been bothering me for a while now. Oh goody!

  8. Rosemarie (Freecyclor) says:

    There is a sequel to Mary Stewart's Arthurian trilogy, called The Wicked Day, which carries the story to Arthur's death.

  9. Linda says:

    You guys rock. LT completes me.

  10. Anonymous says:

    love, love, love it

  11. Chouffin says:

    Fantastic! I admit to just skimming the recs for this very reason — will have to check them out now!

  12. Anonymous says:

    If it's not clear that two books are in the same series and are still listed separately (or if two books are listed together that are NOT in the same series, by accident), how would we point that out to whoever to correct it?

  13. Kay says:

    Brilliant!

  14. paixe says:

    That was incredibly well-said, by the way. That last bit. Hear, hear.

    Also, I love all the little tweaks you lot come up with!

  15. Neck Traction says:

    Nice post. This post will help everyone to pick out the good book easily. Thanks for your great information.

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