When the folks at Abebooks.com sent us a press release heralding their new “BookHints” feature as “the first Web 2.0 online book recommendation system based upon the personal libraries of LibraryThing members,” I had to ask myself, is that all it is, or do they really want to celebrate “the first Web 2.0 online book recommendation system, based upon the personal libraries of LibraryThing members”? Turns out it’s the latter, which actually implicitly makes it the former as well, but you see what I’m getting at, right?
As for the feature itself, well, a sample showing reveals that it’s basically the same thing as Amazon.com‘s “customers who bought this item also bought…” recommendations, only with book jackets! And based on the data from LibraryThing members rather than actual sales data, of course. (Speaking of which, LibraryThing got itself a nice write-up in the Sunday NYT business section, filed under “novelties.”) The most salient aspect of this rollout, perhaps, is the way it attempts to steal the thunder from last week’s announcement of Amazon’s investment in Shelfari, one of the main competitors to LibraryThing (in which AbeBooks has a 40 percent stake), by getting AbeBook’s version of the bells and whistles out first. Although, as Max Magee of The Millions just emailed to point out, “You shouldn’t underestimate how much better LT’s recs are than Amazon’s… People buy books for many, many different reasons—as gifts, for work, etc. However, a book that is part of one’s library is a totally different thing; it’s most likely there because you enjoyed it or expect to.”