Back in March I wrote about the so-called book discovery problem in a post titled Book Discovery: Give Me Blind Dates With Books. In it, I talked about how I think the problem isn't discovery but discrimination: It is, in fact, trivially easy to discover books: Just go to any book store, online or off, and you'll discover more books than you can shake a stick at. The problem is not one of finding books, it is one of discrimination, of deciding which books are worth reading, and it's a problem is compounded by the vast choice on offer. And I said that what I really wanted was a website that just showed me the writing and didn't rely on things like star ratings, reviews, or testimonials, which I think fail to give us a meaningful understanding of what is good and what isn't. I said: I'd love to see a site that lets us go on proper blind dates with books. Strip out all the flawed heuristics, just give me the first chapter and nothing else. No cover, no author name, no publisher, no reviews, no star rating. Just text. You can let me narrow things down by genre or keywords, and you can collect data on how much I read of a first chapter, or how fast I move on to the next blind date, to see just how well I get on with any given book so that you can tailor the next blind date to my evolving preferences. And when I find a book I love, let me marry it, or at least buy it in whatever format I want. It was an idea that I couldn't execute, so I hoped someone else might do something with it. That someone was John Rickards, a friend and the editor of my latest novella. John has taken the easy bits and turned them into No Names, No Jackets, a website which really does give you blind dates with books. The bit about evolving your preferences depending on which chapters you read a lot of turns out to be quite tricky, but everything else is there.
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