I have always been a library lover, and even took a library science course (cataloging and classification) as an undergraduate elective. But from the beginning on Amazon I have liked the "customers who bought this also bought . . . " recommendations built from Amazon's database, and I have learned of many interesting books by Amazon's recommendations that I later bought. In library science, "browsing function" is discovery of books by scanning the shelves where books of similar classification are put, which groups books differently in each library (each library has a different collection, and some libraries are classified by the Dewey system, and some by the Library of Congress system, in English-speaking countries). Amazon does very well as a place to apply the browsing function, because its collection size is huge, and similarities of books can be scanned by author, by subject (Amazon has subject classifications for most of its books), by what readers have written reviews of them, and by what buyers have bought them. I now wish that my friendly local public library, which I use VERY heavily and where my second son volunteers, would implement browsing paths as varied and as powerful as Amazon's, and my local public library is already famous in many parts of the United States for having some of the most detailed cataloging and one of the most powerful and convenient online catalogs in the country.
Compare
https://catalog.hclib.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=elibrary#f...
to
starting with some of your favorite books to see what browsing turns up in each online catalog.