Do you want me to recommend a book? You're sure to love it. (Alexandria Digital Literature)

Member Name: snizzle

Product:	Alexandria Digital Literature
Date:	05/10/01 (58 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: get a list of books that match your taste

Disadvantages: it won't always be accurate

I’m really glad that I came across this site, as I have been wondering what to read next. So far, all I had done was look around on Dooyoo. There are loads of good book reviews on Dooyoo, but unless you know what you are looking for, other than the top-ten lists, there is no quick way of finding books that you will like. So this site was perfect for what I needed.

The best part of this site, is Hypatia. Hypatia is a digital librarian and will recommend books to you, based on your likes / dislikes. Obviously before it can recommend any books, you will need to rate books. This is a very easy process, and surprisingly not tedious at all like I expected. You are free to rate as many as stories as you like. Once you have rated the books on the list, you will get the option of submitting them and stopping, or submitting them and continuing on to rate some more. You will need to rate at least 40 stories if you want a list of recommendations.

The site claims that Hypatia is very accurate. I have not yet read any of the books recommended, so am yet in a position to say. However I have spotted a couple of books on my recommended list, that I have read already, and really enjoyed.. At the same time however, there are a few books on my recommended list, which I started to read but gave up on, as I really didn’t like them. I was a little disappointed to see these books on my recommended list. Maybe I would like these books if I gave them a chance, or maybe Hypatia is not always accurate. Either way, I still think it is very useful. It gives you a very long list of books, which thankfully are ordered by confidence. So the books at the top of the list will be your best bet.

One improvement for the site could be to have better reviews. Once you have been given the list of books, you can click onto either the book or the author to read more, however there is only a short description of one or two sentences. Not usually enough to tell you
enough about the book. But you can always look on Dooyoo, or elsewhere for reviews of the book.

This is actually digital literature web site, but I have not used this yet. There are free samples available, but you will need to pay for most of them. I don’t like the idea of sitting in front of computer screen to read for a long time, so I will not be using this feature.

One criticism of the site, is that it can be difficult to find your way around. It took me a while to locate Hypatia, and I can’t see why there is not a link to this section off the main page. Over all this is a good site and I’m sure of interest to everyone who enjoys reading. Especially useful for anyone who like electronic literature.

If anyone does use the recommender, I would be interested to know how accurate you found it.

Summary: