Hmm, do I dare to look this book up? On the one hand, I’d love to see it with my own eyes, but on the other, I’d hate to think what it would do to my own recommendations.
Ah, what the heck.
Wow. Not only does it exist, but it has 47 customer reviews. And some of them are hilarious!
I was annoyed by the Amazon.com recommendations primarily because they would recommend books I already ordered/bought/read – oftentimes via Amazon.com.
Yeah, I suppose I should just create a “don’t buy this for me” wishlist and add all of those books to it. That’d do the trick, and get them off my back.
Personally, I’d like a feature which would allow you to filter out certain genres, publishers, and authors.
Being a historical fiction nut, I’ve had the distressing experience of being “tricked” by books which appear to be historical fiction but are really romance or even (God help me) “inspirational historical fiction.” Now, I always check the publisher to make sure it’s not Bethany House or any of those romance publishers.
That would be great. I do not want any of Robert Jordan’s books. Ever. Yes, I read fantasy and science fiction. No, I don’t want to read Jordan. Or Anne Rice, for that matter. I don’t care how many people love those authors, I can’t stand them.
My daughter was really into the WoT books for a while, and bought them in hardback. I read them, because they were BOOKS IN MY HOUSE. Now, I don’t think that I’d read another Jordan book unless I was being paid well for it, or unless I knew that the book had been edited by someone new.
I was baffled as to why my DVD recommendations included something called The Wheels on the Bus - Mango Helps the Moon Mouse. (Includes “Full-length reptile show”!) The notes say “Recommended because you rated Monterey Pop - Criterion Collection” Uh, whaaat? Well, it turns out there actually is a connection: Roger Daltrey, who of course appeared with the Who at Monterey–is a voice actor in The Wheels on the Bus.
I wish the recommender thingy could differentiate between the types of books your likely to only need one of versus many. If I buy a book on back pain, I don’t need 20 more titles on back pain. One is enough. But if I buy a mystery novel, there’s a good chance I like that genre and will buy more.
The recommender doesn’t know anything about genre or subject matter. All it knows is what other people have bought. So it’ll never recommend you “one is enough” books. Apparently, a lot of other people who bought that book on back pain also bought other books on back pain. So the problem isn’t the software not knowing that that’s a “one is enough” book; it’s that you don’t have the same opinion as the rest of the populace on what constitutes a “one is enough” book.
“We recommend Fred Astaire’s Singing In The Rain dvd because you recently bought Paint Shop Pro Ten.” Huh?
I like the recs in general, and have found several decent reads that way, but I wish they wouldn’t make cross media-type recs like the one about. My only other pet peeve is that there’s no way to tell it to stop recommending software for macs. I’ve said I’m not interested in 100 mac programs, but it still suggests them repeatedly. I don’t have a mac! I’m never going to buy a mac program!
They are both movies about a man of virgin birth who becomes a messianic figure and dies a tragic death. =D
They recommeded Old Jewish Comedians, because I bought A Treasury Of Victorian Murder.
WTF?
Well, there is. You can tell Amazon not to use that particular item to make recommendations.