Margaret Atwood, Canadian author and inventor of the LongPen, has spoken out about the impersonal nature of book suggestions on online bookshops. Speaking at the London Book Fair last week, Atwood bemoaned Amazon's "if you like this book, you might like this book ... " approach, which often results in suggestions that are "quite offensive", and which fails to reproduce the pleasures of discovering something by "serendipity". As Guy Dammann points out, however plausible Amazon's book suggestions may be, nobody wants their reading patterns to be governed by statistical analyses.
But have you been offended by any of Amazon's suggestions? Maybe you've taken heed of these suggestions, been led to some masterpieces and subsequently discovered, quite worryingly, that Amazon's computer boffins are even more in tune with your tastes than you are. Whatever your experiences, we'd like to hear from you.
