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Amazon used to have a great recommendation page that had a tab for new releases and coming soon. This was incredible for book discovery and they got so much money from me with these pages.

Amazon is currently recommending me shower heads and bathroom hardware from when I remodeled a month ago because I bought that stuff then. Pointless.

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Yup. Buy a printer and you'll see recommendations after you purchase one for every other printer in existence, rather than say, ink, toner for the one you did.

I am actually working on this very problem and trying to make book discovery magical and more of an experience, we just turned 14 months old and slowly working toward more unique approaches -> https://shepherd.com/

For now, you can look for books based on Wikipedia topic (I analyze them using NLP/ML to find connections), or via another favorite book or author. At the heart of everything is 5,000+ authors who recommend their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood.

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