BookLamp, a Pandora-like service that analyzes manuscripts instead of music and creates charts that describe their construction, has been in beta for a few years now. (Teleread first wrote about it back in 2008.) The purpose is to provide a machine-enabled way to compare books side by side in order to improve discovery of new works, without worrying about the distorting influence of marketing budgets or shill reviews. For example, if a book you love scored a 70 on pacing and a 12 on dialogue, then you could use that data to find other books with similar scores.

Wired UK wrote about the service yesterday, and reported that it might be leaving beta soon-ish:

The BookLamp is going to go from “technology demonstration” to a useable “actual service” in coming months; but in the meantime, interested parties can see the DNA graphs of books that the team has already analysed as well as requesting favourite titles that have yet to be included. And it is asking for feedback from visitors to the Beta website, including where the service should go from here.

For now, though, it’s still in beta. Anyone can sign up if you’d like to kick the wheels and give feedback.

“BookLamp analyses the DNA of books” [Wired UK]

NO COMMENTS

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.