Introducing 'Pandora for Books'

Need to find a new book to read? Allow us to introduce you to BookLamp, a project Mashable calls "Pandora for books." BookLamp is a recommendation engine launching today that uses the actual content of a book you like in order to recommend other books you might also like. The creators believe this method of utilizing what they call "Book DNA" will produce better recommendations than other sites that rely on marketing data for their recommendations. The only drawback? There are currently only about 20,000 books catalogued.

BookLamp scans texts of partner publishers and measures both story components and writing style. It then looks for other books that match that style and content, as opposed to other recommendation engines, which just look at books "people like you" have bought. One of the results is more diverse recommendations: "I’ll start off in science fiction, end up in fantasy, wander over historical fiction, wander over to some western," says the CEO. "There’s this easy and smooth transition between genres and meta data that is hard to do in other systems." Mashable has screen shots. (More books stories.)