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Fred "Rerun" Barry once commented here.

November 13th, 2006

UnSuggestions

I bet you love Amazon’s suggestion engine and have found some new books based on your previous purchases. But I also bet that you want to think outside the box. You’re thinking, “My, a great young adult novel about a middle school girl’s trials and tribulations would look great next to my copy of Programming Perl, but I don’t know what I should buy!”

Well, thanks to the ever-excellent LibraryThing, you can now get “UnSuggestions” on books. That is, books that are the least like any given book that you’re searching for. It’s a great concept explained in depth on their blog.

From my own catalog, the opposite of The Polar Express is Douglas Copeland’s Life After God. The opposite of Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show is a book titled Blue like jazz : nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality. And the unsuggestion for Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is Can you keep a secret? by Sophie Kinsella (um… ok).

Go ahead, enter a book into their suggestions page and see what you come up with.

Posted in Technology

Robert November 16, 2006, 2:35 am

I plugged in The Holy Bible and was unsuggested . . . The Hours by Micheal Cunningham?!

The correct answer is Necronomicon.

Duh.

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