Alexandria Digital Literature, one of the earliest e-book stores (though the store portion of the site is now defunct), has gotten its collaborative filtering literature recommender, Hypatia, up and running again after a while of being down, and is accepting new accounts.
Hypatia is a unique system that is still entirely unmatched on the web today. To use it, you go in and spend time rating books and stories. You might rate a book you truly love as “Fabulous”, one that you enjoyed a whole lot but doesn’t quite reach the level of “love” as “Excellent,” and so on.
Once you have rated a sufficient number of books, Hypatia will compare your tastes to those of thousands of other patrons on file, see which ones are the most similar to yours, and then display a list of books they loved that you haven’t read yet. This gives you a great basis for making out your next check-out list at the library or searching for e-books.
Back in Alexlit’s heyday, I discovered many of my current favorite authors through the recommender. Perhaps you can do the same.
One caveat: Alexlit currently runs on a trial version of a database server that allows only five simultaneous users, so it is possible the site might hit capacity fairly quickly. If that happens, just try again in a few hours.
For more information on Alexlit, check out this summary of the podcast interview I did with its founder, Dave Howell, three years ago.
Wow. It’s back. It’s amazing that my old book list is still there. All the rating are unread but it’s the same for the whole site.
And then it’s gone again. During its brief revival, it was at http://www.alexlit.org, not http://www.alexlit.com
Long live Alexandria Digital Literature