One of my Twitter buddies has started a project which coincides with a lot of my interests: create a rich and standardized system of tags for searching and sorting through novels, to help readers “discover” (lord, did I learn to hate that word while I worked at a search engine startup) books that fit their interests–and don’t contain things that bother them.
All she has now is the idea and a form for people to enter information about fantasy novels, so she can gather data for proof-of-concept and to demonstrate interest in the idea. Basically she wants you to checkmark a lot of tags about a fantasy novel of your choice. And you can do it for as many novels as you want.
Anyway, I thought I would boost her signal. I know that libraries have been dancing around this idea for years, and that regular search engines can look through books, but that isn’t the same as sorting books by themes, world types, character types, hot-button aspects (like rape scenes), etc etc, which is what she’s aiming for.
Go have a look, enter a book. Thanks!