Comment by greenie_beans

so sick!! always wanted to do something like this but would use it for my saas (https://bookhead.net), so i'm hesitant to scrape goodreads due to their terms of service.

in addition to the goodreads data, i think it would be interesting to add an author's favorite books by scraping their paris review interviews (and other interviews) and using that as a "review" because i've learned about so much good stuff through an artist mention.

and in a retail context, i've always wondered if a recommendation engine like this could have its own "flavor" based on a specific store's customer buying history. like if a bookstore's customers were weighted in the algorithm so that their similarities scores were given preference. much of what a bookstore carries is based on their customers' taste. you could use the goodreads etc as the base recommendations and then train it on a bookstore's sales history.

a project like this is a bit outside of my expertise but i have a tiny bit of knowledge about it, and now i have a lot more to learn after seeing this. if anybody has any good book recommendations (hehe) or papers i should read to learn about these sort of systems, please let me know!

thank you for sharing!!