The Open Book Genome Project

"Nine years later, Will Glaser & Tim Westergren drew inspiration from HGP and launched a similar effort called the Music Genome Project, using trained experts to classify and label music according to a taxonomy of characteristics, like genre and tempo. This system became the engine which powers song recommendations for Pandora Radio.

Circa 2003, Aaron Stanton, Matt Monroe, Sidian Jones, and Dan Bowen adapted the idea of Pandora to books, creating a book recommendation service called BookLamp. Under the hood, they devised a Book Genome Project which combined computers and crowds to “identify, track, measure, and study the multitude of features that make up a book”....

In 2006, a project called the Open Music Genome Project attempted to create a public, open, community alternative to Pandora’s Music Genome Project. We thought this was a beautiful gesture and a great opportunity for Open Library; perhaps we could facilitate public book insights which any project in the ecosystem could use to create their own answer for, “what is a book?”. We also found inspiration from complimentary projects like StoryGraph, which elegantly crowd sources book tags from patrons to help you, “choose your next book based on your mood and your favorite topics and themes”, HaithiTrust Research Center (HTRC) which has led the way in making book data available to researchers, and the Open Syllabus Project which is surfacing useful academic books based on their usage across college curriculum....

Our hope is that this Open Book Genome Project will help responsibly make book data more useful and accessible to the public: to power book recommendations, to compare books based on their similarities and differences, to produce more accurate summaries, to calculate reading levels to match audiences to books, to surface citations and urls mentioned within books, and more...."