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March 28, 2005

Finding Something to Read

I use Amazon's wish list to keep track of books I want to read or at least check out. I sometimes browse through their recommendations engine to find something new to read, but these days that's not as often as Amazon might like. Not because I have no money to spend, but because the engine is broken in a few really critical ways.

I always feel like such a crank when I go off to waste time on Amazon and get foiled by the recommendations engine. For one thing, it always ends up with me muttering nasty things at the computer.

1. It shows me stuff I've already bought in a different medium. Chances are, if I bought it in hardcover, no matter how much I loved it I'm not likely to also buy it in trade paper and mass market paperback.
2. It shows me things that are already on my wish list. It's not uncommon for me to be flipping through my recommendations and find a book that looks familiar and noteworthy, and decide to check it out. For me that means adding it to my wish list and then looking at it later in a store, which will help me decide if I want to buy it or take it out of the library or just not bother. I only very rarely buy books based solely on the information on Amazon, not in the least because they never ever say what kind of paper the book is printed on. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, the book is already on my wish list, and I just give up and do something else with my spare time. Amazon could really be selling me stuff here and they're falling down.
3. It shows me a hundred variations on what I bought last. I bought the textbook for my calculus classes on Amazon. The next time I went to see my recommendations, there were fourteen calculus textbooks there. The time to sell me alternatives to a textbook or reference is before I've paid, not after. Amazon has absolutely no filters for knowing the difference between liking novels about space ships and buying a non-fiction book on the space program, so everybody is treated as if they are doing in-depth research on anything they express an interest in.
4. It keeps showing me the same stuff. Unless I tell it I'm not interested in something, that thing keeps reappearing on my recommendations. Why not keep track of how long it has been there and rank it downward, eventually off the list? Obviously, if I look at my recommendations every two weeks, and in fourteen weeks I have not even clicked on a particular book, I'm not as interested as you think.
5. It can't handle broad interests. I'm interested in a lot of things. For some reason, Amazon is better tuned to handle people who like one thing (example: dogs) and barrage them with everything it has related to that thing (example: dog-shaped earmuffs). It grew exasperated with me last Christmas and offered a book on dealing with multiple personalities. I say an impatient salesman is a bad salesman, and one thing machines should be able to do perfectly is avoid getting impatient.
6. It thinks like a computer. I recently ranked a book by Porter Shreve very highly. It recommended I read a book by Anita Shreve. I know this is going to come as a shock, but somehow, I doubt that everybody with the same last name writes in the same style.
7. It shows me stuff it should know better than to show me. Every now and then the recommendations engine seems to lose its brain and offer up a selection of boring mass-market movies and music that could not possibly be of interest to me. Given that I've been buying from them since sometime in 1998, and I rank books I've read but not bought through them just to improve the recommendations, you'd think they could do better than falling back on the best-sellers list. If I want that, I'll be somewhere that is explicitly that.

I like nothing better than browsing around a bookstore, and Amazon is like a sort of book store with a search engine attached (convenient as somehow real bookstores will have shelved that book of writing about food in biography instead of cookbooks where you were expecting it to be). Somehow, I doubt I'm the only person who gets frustrated and just gives up, and all of us who do that are customers who are asking to have books sold to them. Sure, Amazon is not a bookstore any more, but the recommendations engine is just as bad for non-book items (which I don't tend to browse around for, hence the general lack of use of the recommendations engine).

Posted by ayse on 03/28/05 at 8:22 PM