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As a potential power user of your platform, let me just say I really hope you solve the book recommendations problem, agnostic of sales or other influence. I spent almost as much time hunting for new books/authors as I do actually reading them.

Social feeds, custom bookshelves, etc. are all already-solved problems or window dressing compared to this real gap of creating a truly usable book graph.

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I really like the idea of a book graph. Heck, if the platform suggested that I read the references for books I'm currently reading, that would be interesting.

Yeah, Amazon's seems to be based off of customer purchase history and some tagged metadata, but almost always just ends up recommending the most popular book by sales (which are not necessarily the best).

Short of some infeasible brute NLP of books, I can't really think of ways to do this in an automated fashion, outside of gamifying data input from users.

You can submit citation data for any written work (including books or scholarly articles) on Wikidata and view the citation, coautorship etc. graphs on the Scholia frontend. Works quite well in practice.

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