Recently I found a fun new site called Booklamp–it helps you find new books by comparing and contrasting the content of books you enjoy, similar to the way Pandora.com helps music lovers find new music. To quote Booklamp:
“We’re attempting to help you find books with similar themes and writing style to books you’ve enjoyed in the past – comparing elements like Description, Pacing, Density, Perspective, and Dialog – while at the same time allowing you to specify details like… more Medieval Weapons.”
Booklamp identifies and parses the “story DNA” of various books, then uses that information to help you find similar stories. You can search for books by Story DNA, Book Title, Author, or Genre.
As an experiment I searched for books with DNA similar to Hostage Zero by our own John Gilstrap. Booklamp suggested matches to “similar” books by various authors, including Christopher Reich, Lisa Unger, Anne McCaffrey, Louis L’Amour, and even William Faulkner.
Booklamp claims to be advertiser independent, which means you won’t have your results filtered through marketing budgets. This means that mid-listers and newbies will have a fighting chance to turn up in results.
Booklamp is actively seeking publishers to sign on to the project right now–many publishers (and therefore authors) are not represented. But I’m hoping the project will catch fire.
Check it out, and let us know what you think. Is this something you would use, as a reader or writer?
Like any published author, I entered my name and the titles of my novels and found them absent. But once more publishers sign on, I think this could be a neat tool for readers (and a nice marketing tool for publishers and authors).
Thanks for the heads-up.
Richard, my books are also MIA!1 The Booklamp site asks people to encourage publishers to sign up, to help make the database more comprehensive.
I was utterly frustrated. I put in title after title and it didn’t recognize any of them. And while it does drop down a list of similar title keywords, that was absolutely no help because I’d never heard of any of those books.
WHile the concept behind the project is useful, it’s going to be useless until they import a mega-load of data into their system. And if they’re relying on publishers to be the ones to take the lead and put in the data, I just don’t see it happening.
ACFW’s FictionFinder.com suffers from a similar malady–authors do not update their data to the site (though that site is not intended to be comparative–it’s just to help people finds books of a certain genre or interest).
BK Jackson
http://www.bkjackson.blogspot.com
It sounds pretty cool! If my TBR list weren’t so long to begin with, I could probably use it.
BK, I agree–it has a long way to go to be anything close to comprehensive. I’m wondering why publishers have to sign on–I wonder why authors can’t give permission, or even why permission is needed. After all, it’s just a type of search.
Lisa, I’m always in the market for a new TBR, so if this takes off, I’ll be using it.
I love Pandora so once this site is more comprehensive I think I would use it. I do find some selections on Pandora ‘interesting’ – who knew I was a closet punk fan?! -so who knows what book lamp would come up with!
Kathryn, I am drooling over this thing. I need about six hours in my man-cave with the door locked and a coffee i.v. to really check it out. Thanks for the 411 on it. It will be interesting to watch it evolve over the next three to six months.
Unlike Gilstrap, I have never had my name printed that close to Faulker’s … by anybody, anywhere.
Clare, I’m with you–I think it will be great once it gets going. Joe, John, unusual pairing suggestions is one of the wonderful aspects of this tool–you never know how your writing can be similar to someone unexpected!
Very, VERY cool idea. Kudos!
Angela @ The Bookshelf Muse