Unsuggester: Finding the Book You'll Never Want

Selanit writes "Lots of socially-oriented sites provide suggestions for things you might like based on user-provided data. But how many can claim to offer you things you'll probably hate? LibraryThing, the social book-cataloging site, has used its database of personal libraries to create UnSuggester, which does exactly that. You type in a book you like, "It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest." For example, apparently readers of Edward Said's "Orientalism" rarely purchase "Ella Enchanted" by Gail Carson Levine. Who'd have thought? Quirky though it may be, the tool seems an interesting way to broaden your horizons. If you're a hidebound, crufty old fogey, I un-recommend it!"

'Tis the Season

Just in time for the holiday shopping season!!! Revenge for all the ugly shirts, sweaters and every other "squishy' gift. [Evil laugh]

I'm not so sure about that...

It kept recommending the Bible.

Re:I'm not so sure about that...

I _never_ found the _underscore_ as _annoying_ as it is in _your_post_.

Re:I'm not so sure about that...

The underscore is particularly useless considering we have other mark-up abilities. The only thing worse than underlined text is text that was meant to be underlined but was instead surrounded by underscores.

I'm unique!

Apparently, not enough people have read The Art of Fisting [amazon.com], so there are no "opposite" books to read.

Re:I'm unique!

Having that book on your coffee table probably goes a long way toward explaining why the girls you bring over to your place never stay the night.

Re:I'm unique!

Hey! I have that book on my coffee table and it seems like every girl I have over won't leave

Re:I'm unique!

Untie her and open the closet and THEN see what happens.

What's next?

. . ., the social book-cataloging site. . .

What's next? Social misanthropy sites?

I made that once.

It was a static HTML page containing the bibliography of Dan Brown.

In reverse...

Probably a better way to broaden your horizons is to enter a book that you read (or started to read) and knew you hated. Then it might tell you about some books you may like. It won't always work because it isn't tailored to your own tastes (your own likes/dislikes) so there aren't two poles in the general evaluation but at least it may give you some ideas and even open you up to some other genres of books.

OK.....

Those of you who have bought will NOT like....

Zen Buddhism --- War in 3 Easy Steps

Idiots Guide to become a Stock Broker --- Honor and Ethics

The Holy Bible --- Pedophiles in our World

Guide to Windows Vista --- Kama Sutra

Re:The Holy Bible --- Pedophiles in our World

Guide to Sarcasm on the Internet ---- How to Communicate Effectively

Slow or slashdotted...?

It might help if every Slashdotter wasn't typing in his favorite science fiction book (i.e., "The Joy of Sex"). The website is slower than a snail in heat.

It's uncanny!

How did slashdot know that, based on my use of search engines and other meta-ish things to find things that I want, need, or would like, that the thing the article describes is exactly something I won't use! It works so well that even posted summaries about articles about it are un-compelling. For extra credit, mod this comment overrated so more people will read it.

Or..

...simply click here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Catherine-Cookson-Complete -Collection-Disc/dp/B0009PZ8I0 [amazon.co.uk]

Lisp and Wuthering Heights?

The site has some example "opposites" on the front page. Some of the "opposites" made some sense -- like St. Augustine's "Confessions", and some romance novel called "Night Pleasures". But a book about Lisp and Wuthering Heights?

Although, to tell the truth, although I've programmed in many languages, and read Wuthering Heights, I've never actually programmed in Lisp... may be there's something to this...

King vs Pratchett

I tossed Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" in there to see what I might not like to read and to my surprise the result was a great deal of Terry Pratchett.. Of course, like many others, I love Pratchett and I've read most of the Discworld series...

I was going to toss Pratchett in there and see if King was the result, but with the slashdotting of the site, I think that will have to wait..

I must remind myself to never get listed on the frontpage of slashdot...

Added to your Google Book Search

[e-mail] and anything is possible. A negative search can be just as valuable as a positive one.

I'd rather see a system based on ratings...

not purchases.

I've purchased many books it turned out I didn't like, and I didn't recommend.

I'd rather see a "You liked these books, which indicate the following books may also be for you, and the other books here won't be as interesting, based on reviews of other users."

Rather than a "Users who bought this book also bought that book!"

I dunno, say something that takes your oppinion on a book, such as:
"Book A", 8 of 10

and then comes up with:
The top three books for people who gave "Book A" an 8 of 10 are:
"Book B"
"Book C"
"Book D"
The bottom three are:
"Book E"
"Book F"
"Book G"

The top three books for people who gave "Book A" greater than 5 out of 10 are:
"Book B"
"Book H"
"Book I"

hmm... slashdotters unite! We could make this!

Re:I'd rather see a system based on ratings...

IOW, you want a literary version of MovieLens [umn.edu]. You know what? So do I!

that explains all the email I get :-D

obviously, prior art exists, no patent forrrr you. the spammers have been using this engine for years.

How about...

A site which suggests which Slashdot stories I won't like, including dupes?

Moo

Read all comments on this story as +1, instead of +5.

It probably works!

I wrote "Lord of the Rings", and it "unsuggested" : "Knitting on the road : sock patterns for the traveling knitter by Nancy Bush"

Re:It probably works!

You may be on to something there.

Given a choice, I'd much rather read 'Knitting on the Road' then suffer through Tolkien again.

---

While knitting on the road on her journey to Gandalung, wending solemnly through the treachorous passes of Orkdell, Nancy espied a riotous figure approaching from the shadowy North, wherein dwelt the Elves of Glimmersill.

"Greetings Knitting Lady of the Road", addressed the stout and sturdy figure, "allow me the honour of addressing you and giving you an 800 page recitation of my lineage."

It's all the other way around: the Da Vinci Code

You're all missing the good thing: type in a book you loath and it will come up with a good one instead! Perfect for changing Christmas gifts!

I typed in "Da vinci code" and it came back with (amongst others) two Lisp books and Knuth's Art of Programming (3 volumes). If that isn't a good alternative to world famous besteller author Dan Brown's biggest cash cow...

"Books you don't need in a place you can't find"

Reminds me the Book Mill [wikipedia.org] in Montague, Massachusetts, whose slogan is "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." The Bookmill is a good place to look for books you didn't know you wanted.

Another good place is the New England Mobile Book Fair. [nebookfair.com] The fact that the "mobile book fair" is a huge, stationary building tips you off that there's something quirky here. This huge bookstore in Newton, Massachusetts is only good for two things: finding one specific title, or pursuing utter serendipity.

Its slogan should be "Books you can't find in a place that has them all." OK, it doesn't have all of them, but your chances of finding a specific title there are way higher than at Barnes and Noble.

You see, for unknown reasons--I assume the bulk of their business must be supplying schools or something--their books are organized, first by binding (paper or hardbound); then, by publisher; and, within publisher, by title. You don't realize how bizarre this is until you experience it. After all, even if you know the title you often don't know the publisher, so the first step in finding any specific book is to look it up in their electronic copy of Books In Print.

Once you've found the book, even if you are curious about other books by the same author and are correct in suppose they're published by the same publisher, you still can't find them because they're not alphabetized by title.

Oh, and did I mention that they double-shelve their books, so even if you know the binding, publisher, title and they have it, it may not be visible on the shelf?

Strange...

Every time I enter something from my large, diverse personal library, all I get in return are various books by Jon Katz.

Music Bizarro

I tried to do something similar in concept the other day, clicking around last.fm [www.last.fm] in search of someone with whom I did not share a single common artist.

The closest I got was one MrLag, with whom the only commonality was U2 and Dido :-)

(Of course, my "musical opposite" should have listened to about the same number of artists/tracks for this to be interesting)

Not impressed

When I entered Atlas Shrugged, it gave me Vogue Knitting on the Go.

I don't think it takes a computer to make than connection.....

I like some of their "mismatches"

The #1 unsuggestion for "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" (a great book) is "The Devil Wears Prada", which I thought was pretty good. Just because not many people are likely to own both doesn't mean you can expect an active dislike the way you would between, say, an Ann Coulter book and a Michael Moore book.

huh...i guess amazon would not be moving to this..

huh...i guess amazon would not be moving to this any time soon ;-)

btw, not that great: i typed in lord of the rings, and it came back with this load of books by mary higgins clark..another one of my fav authors...

but get this: number 50 on the list was.........The hobbit!!

hehe...someone messed with the unsuggesters head..../me thinks the frost posters got to it...another one bites the dust!! long live the slashdot troll coalition!

i will go now...

Not very well done...

...though this might be the result of too small a dataset. Every book I put in resulted in an "unsuggestion" list with at least one book I also liked, or, in some cases, books I knew someone who also liked my main suggestion liked. It seems it's a lot easier to find similarities than unsimilarities, because it's easy to guess that people who like 'A' will like 'A1', 'A2' and 'A3', but it does not follow that they WON'T like 'B'. Why, for example, would I not like Harry Potter because I like Ringworld? Why would my wife be unable to enjoy both science fiction and chick-lit? And why does like Raymond Feist's fantasy mean I'm uninterested in books on programming?

People are complex, and only a few truly pathetic souls have their interests defined so narrowly that it's safe to guess what they don't like based on what they do.

It's a brilliant idea! (cf travel guides)

The danger of Website.com recommends-type systems has always been the potential for the formation of subcultural ghettos, where everyone sticks in the "safe zones" of recommended material. To date, it never seems to have materialised, but Internet shopping still isn't mainstream enough for it to really be likely.

Being able to identify a "danger zones" could just give the user the courage to step out of the safe zone into the unknown.

It's analogous to the guide-book industry. Not so long ago, travel guides tended to be a checklist of what to see and what to do; nowadays, they tend to list what you could do, but while they tell you what you shouldn't do, they rarely attempt to tell you what you should.

HAL.

Used in reverse...

I think I may have discovered a new author to try...

On a whim, I tried searching for some of the most unreadably boring books possible - The business motivational/strategy genre.

Unsurprisingly, I kept seeing top-10 opposites that I really enjoy... A lot of Gaiman, some Prachett, even Robert Graves (From which I might hypothesize that the business world somehow forms the antithesis of our collective mythic tradions). But I also saw someone named Haruki Murakami consistantly appearing in the #1 or #2 slot.

Guess I'll have to give him a shot, although checking out a few synopses of his more popular works, I don't see why he would fall in among the afforementioned opposites.

It doesn't work!

I typed in about 20 books that I own and that I thought could give interesting results, and the answer was invariably "Sorry. A book must be owned by at least 75 members to have unrecommendations."

Strange Coincidence

This is pretty funny. I selected "Applied cryptography" by Bruce Schneier as a book in my library and the UnSuggester selected "The Devil Wears Prada" as the book I'm least likely to own. Ironically enough, I happen to be downloading the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" with Bittorrent at this very moment, LOL!

Note: To deal with Slashdot, we've degraded the search capability, to titles only, and search for the beginning of the title, not the middle. UnSuggestions for Applied cryptography : protocols, algorithms, and source code in C by Bruce Schneier 224 members (2,975 more popular); 2 reviews; average rating 4.2 stars. Members with the book have have a total of 123,804 books in their libraries (see good suggestions). 1. The devil wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger (expected 20.1, found 1; unsuggestions)

I predict this is how millions of people...

will become familiar with "goatse." Don't say I didn't warn you!

A better idea

While good for a gag gift, I don't think this is useful for broadening horizons... way too painful.

Here's a better idea:

Given the books I've liked, and the books I've disliked, find me a book that my profile tells you the least (widest confidence interval on expected rating) about whether I'd like it or not.

This would have the effect of encouraging genre hopping, and encouraging the reading of fairly evenly split love it or hate it books, which are often interesting at least in concept. Sounds a lot better than reading 10 books on topic X.

I might even want to see some of this behavior weighted into the normal recommendation system, and if you do want to keep the old recommendations around change their listing heading to "Similar books" rather than "Recommended".

It *must* be broken

It doesn't work. I have proof [librarything.com]

Find the Best Unsuggested Library

A colleague points out that current sport among search mavens is to find the "the
perfectly evil book which causes the Unsuggester to generate a great library. The best try so far was "Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids", but not enough people own it."

The very fact that there is a WMMC for kids gives me greater despair then knowing GWB will be President for two more years.

Although the WMMC regular ed. unsuggestions are pretty good, good enough to keep my book club busy for a few years:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/12799 [librarything.com]

This is ridiculous!

Pretty much every book I enter I get 'unsuggested' a book that I've both read and enjoyed!

Alan Moore's 'Watchmen' gives me Brian McLaren's works, which I love.

Brian McLaren's 'The Last Word and the Word After That' gives me 'Good Omens', by Pratchett and Gaiman, which I've read more times than I can remember.

'Small Gods', by Pratchett gives me 'The Jesus I Never Knew', by Yancey. Again, an excellent, profound book.

And then Yancey's work, in turn, leads me to Douglas Adams, who needs no defense!

What's the message here? That I'm unique in being intrigued both postmodern explorations of faith as well as surreal British fantasy works? Surely there must be others like me out there? Or is there really such a great literary secular/sacred divide that readers on either side dare not cross?

Hmm yes...

There was one day when I tried to make the convenience store clerk's head explode by buying pocketbook editions of Kama Sutra and Tolkien's Unfinished Tales on the same day...

Thanks to Slashdot for reminding me of this site. I heard about this site last month and wanted to join even before I visited it, just never got around =) And now that it was mentioned in Slashdot, it hold up for a while and then I just got an error message. Now I have half of the contents of my bookshelves stacked next to my computer and no way to enter this stuff. Hmm, wonder how this upload thing works... *fires up OpenOffice.org*

Complete BS!

I happen to like ANSI Commond LISP and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women!!

It assumes that if you like Sci-Fi, you must be a geek and won't like things related to Christianity or Literature (and vice-versa).

They either have sucky algorithms or people have narrower tastes than I expected. I hope it's the former...

Better way to broaden your horizons

Quirky though it may be, the tool seems an interesting way to broaden your horizons.

The way I use to broaden my horizons is to buy books in a discount store. In England, a typical novel might cost about £7.00 or £8.00, while some discount stores have a "3 books for £5" offer. Often, these offers are for authors that I have never heard of. I have been buying most of my novels in this way for several years and most of the discount books by authors-unknown-to-me that I have bought have been as entertaining as full-priced books by authors I know. As somebody who reads 100+ books a year, there is the added bonus that it saves me a lot of money.

It must be flawed

I put in 1984 and it came up with The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams and The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien... but then again it did return Little Women by Louisa May Alcott...

Yay

Let's type in Oprah's book list to find some books worth reading.

Hmm....

...where's the slownewsday tag?

Opposite attract.

This thing is great. I put in Programming Python and the list came back with a bunch of books that my girlfriend loves. It worked the same for every book title we tried.

LibraryThing is crack for bibliophiles

Librarything is wonderful. The Unsuggester is cool in a geeky way, but way down on the list of impressive features. There's some more info about how the Suggester and Unsuggester work in this post on the LibraryThing Blog [librarything.com].

A lot of the really good features only become apparent once you've created an account (best online account creation ever) and added some books. You can add 200 for free, and adding them is easy - go on, give it a try. For a start, you can get suggestions that take your entire library into account.

They're also having a very active dialogue with people in the library science field, and employ an actual real-life librarian. ;)

I was not paid to say any of this! I'm just a very satisfied paid up member of the site since shortly after it appeared.

Interesting suggestions

Try this:
http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/920 [librarything.com]
For some reason the bible doesn't feature :P

Best Unsuggestion...

"My Life" by Bill Clinton returns "Don't Waste Your Life" by John Piper... maybe someone should mail a copy to ex-Pres. Bill!

Something odd

There is something odd about the The Harry Potter boxed set by J.K. Rowling, it seems to come up a lot in my trials as a book I wouldn't want to read. (Ignoring the fact that I've read to pretty much enjoyed all the books so far)

It came up under searches for:
* The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold.
* Kim by Rudyard Kipling
* Startide rising by David Brin
* The voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis
* Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone by J.K. Rowling

The first three I could see where there might not be huge overlap with the Harry Potter audience, but I would have expected more overlap with the fourth, and the fifth by definition overlaps. Odd.

Ignoring that oddity, the unsuggestions that were most obviously wrong for me were the ones for Castles of steel : Britain, Germany, and the winning of the Great War at sea by Robert K. Massie.
It unsuggested:
  16. Little house on the prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
  42. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
  62. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
  73. Good omens : the nice and accurate prophecies of Agnes Nutter, witch : a novel by Neil Gaiman

All of which I've enjoyed, especially the last.

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide Reader != Christian

You know, it's not just the "Hitchiker's Guide". All kinds of books come up with tons of Christian references. "Guns Germs and Steel", I might see, but "Watership Down"?

There's probably something a little deeper here, that a social scientist could track down. Given what the list says, "Expected N, found M", it seems that they're taking the overall popularity of a certain book (N) and comparing it to the popularity of people who bought the book in question (M). Christianity may come up a lot because it is very on-or-off: either you're interested in reading about it, in which case you've bought a number of books on the subject, or you're not, in which case you haven't.

Either that, or the algorithm is secretly trying to push Christianity... :-)

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide Reader != Christian

Easy, put in a Bible-related [librarything.com] book and receive some great reads! Three of which I've already read. I really would be interested to know how this site works!

Monkeyboi :D

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide Reader != Christian

Interestingly, these books, especially the top suggestions, are mostly focused on a particular strand of Christianity too. Most of these books are from authors of a strong Calvinist bent (all of the first 10, for example) or from authors who are are contriversial in Calvinist circles (Brian D. McLaren). Oddly, I own 4 of the unsuggestions as well as everything Douglas Adams has written (yes, including last chance to see)

Re:Bible not popular

No, the problem is there are dozens of editions of the Bible. Normally, LibraryThing users combine books by the same author, but the author of the Bible varies so much between editons (it's usually the editorial team), and LibraryThing doesnt' currently allow cross-author combinations. The problem affects the Koran too.

Re:hitchhikers guide

It's worth noting (coincidence or not) that Douglas Adams was an atheist.