What Do I Read Next?

Who hasn’t encountered Amazon’s famous “People who bought this product also liked…” recommendations? More often than not, those recommendations aren’t annoying shots in the dark guessing what you might like; they are actually pretty good. But the algorithm wasn’t always this good. In fact, in the beginning, when Amazon didn’t have a history of your previous purchases, they had human critics recommending “the Amazon voice” on its site. Sounds so quaint now, doesn’t it? Then, when the algorithms replaced the humans, they weren’t exactly smart. As James Marcus described the initial algorithms in his book, Amazonia:

“It felt as if you had gone shopping with the village idiot.”

Then Amazon realized it didn’t have to customize suggestions based on individuals; rather they could just identify correlations between products; and make their recommendations based on the latter!

But even as the algorithms got better, there remained several problems for Amazon to improve their recommendations:

1)      What about all your purchases made before Amazon? They didn’t know that history.

2)     And your purchases made outside Amazon? An Amazon blind spot.

3)     And most importantly, did you like that book you bought? Amazon only knew that you bought it; but not if you liked it.

To address the above points, Amazon needed more of your data, but who would take the time to agree to key in all that missing info? What was their incentive?

Then there were the bookstores. No longer the sole suppliers of books in the neighborhood (thanks to Amazon), they needed some way to provide value to the customer to make him come to the store. But what?

In 2007, Otis Chandler launched a site called Goodreads asking users to key in the books they had read; and to rate them. In return, based on that info and its own algorithms, Goodreads would recommend books to you (I recently registered at Goodreads recently and am very impressed with their recommendations). Of course, it gets better the more data you enter. So that’s your incentive to tell more about your reading preferences to the site: discovery of other books you might like.

Unlike the publishing industry and the bookstores that didn’t act on the potential of Goodreads, Amazon did. In 2013, they bought Goodreads! And soon integrated your Amazon and Goodreads accounts into one, thereby solving all of the 3 problems I had listed for Amazon: knowing more of your reading history and knowing what you liked. Now new joinees can use their Amazon ID when registering at Goodreads: which makes perfect sense.

Say what you like about Amazon, but they sure know how to run, sustain and expand their company’s prospects.