The Sword and Laser discussion

I noticed something after I shelved some Octavia E. Butler books the other day. When I log into Goodreads and it happens to have suggestions based on one of her books, all the recommendations are by female authors. Now I have nothing against female authors and have read many of the ones it suggests, but I find this curious.
Do you think there are so many people who only read female authors that the results just skew this way, or that females really write so differently from males?
It's not really a big deal; it just got me wondering how the recommendations work.

I think the recommendations engine on here is not accurate, it just picks up on one aspect of the book and recommends based on it. I wish I had written down the specific title but I remember after reading an m/m (gay) romance once I had a Christian historical fiction novel in my recommendation list all because the two novels shared a similar historical setting in the ancient world. Also, upon reading atheist works I had fundamentalist stuff recommended to me and once even a Glenn Beck book. I don't think you should try and read more into this than it making recommendations on the surface level.

However, I think having a discussion about whether women write differently and if one can tell the gender of someone just based on their writing is a discussion that is worth having. Or that of whether readers are sexist when choosing books, etc. But that would be for another thread...

Keep in mind that the recommendations are not always from the same source. The line above the books will tell you what it's based on. Sometimes mine are from my to-read shelf, sometimes they're because I read a particular book. It seems like if you refresh the page it cycles through a few different versions

What I don't like is that I end up with the same books in different categories. I've had the same book show up as scifi, fantasy, classic, and general fiction.

Amazon's can be very irritating too, when you buy one book by an author and suddenly your recommendations are full of every other book that author ever wrote.

I've noticed that books classed as science fiction ends up in the science section of the recommendation. So most of my recommended science books are really sci-fi.

I think the reccomendation engine looks at what other people who have read Book(s) simular to yours and puts those up there. I doubt there is some kind (or much of) of meta classification, like say, Pandora.

I've had it select a few books I wound up liking which I had never heard of. It also shows me a lot of short story anthologies, which are hard for me to be aware of, living where I do. eg: The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes It does put up a lot of garbage, sometimes even recommending alternate editions of books I have read and rated on the site, but it's easy to ignore if you don't like it.

Alicja wrote: "I think the recommendations engine on here is not accurate, it just picks up on one aspect of the book and recommends based on it. I wish I had written down the specific title but I remember after ..."

Patrick Rothfuss ran an interesting experiment/ contest some what based on this recently. When he started tweeting he had 5 people tweeting that were not him as well as him. The fans were suppose to guess witch handle was him. Not only did a woman, Mary Robinette Kowal, win the contest, all the other tweeters were woman (including Veronica). And while it was obvious that some of the handles were not Patrick, most folks were guessing different men ( John Scalzi or Wil Wheaton) as who these handles really were.

Now, writing with there own voice, vs. trying to impersonate some one else, would it be more obvious who was who? I don't know. I also don't know if it would translate to longer works, but it was still interesting.

No idea, as I rarely look at the books it recommends for me. That said, a fun game I've been having is asking for random book "recommendations". ;) I like to click and see what comes up in the random queue.

I've found the standard recommendations slightly disappointing as well. Though it has helped broaden my horizons somewhat. I've had quite a bit of luck using Gnooks to find books that are similar to ones I really liked. You might try that though it's not perfect in any way shape or form.

One of the issues with doing things like this is whether you want to incorporate some kind of surprise factor. With enough data it's not that hard to do the standard "Person X liked A, you liked A, so if Person X likes B we think you'll like B".

Another way to do these is to build a taste profile and that can get... interesting. Especially if you shelve multiple odd things. It's the analogue to what happens when 2 people share an Amazon account or you start gift shopping and all of a sudden your profile has wildly varying things in it.

@Georen

I just tried that and got an Italian fantasy writer that does not publish in English, though the book covers look good.

GR Recommendations is heavily affected by it's largest demographic: kids roughly between 12 - 20. Even if you set up a fresh account, added ONLY adult epic fantasy like Malazan and Black Company, you'd get a pretty fair amount of YA recommendations.