Members with your books; the Agatha Christie issue.

I think it would be cool if we could choose to remove some books/authors from the mix when viewing the 'members with your books' list. Removing Agatha Christie would be nice for me personally, because so many read Christie. Also, J.K. Rowling. Everyone on my weighted top list shares Christie and Rowling with me, but not much else.

I have the same issue with a different profile. That's why I suggest a way to view members with a similar tag mirror, then you'd see members with similar interests if not the same books -- except a lot of people have tagged their Agatha Christie books 'Agatha Christie' and 'Christie' so you'd still get the other Christie fans in your list.

"Members with your books" definitely needs tweaking. Right now it favours small libraries way too much. I don't know whether excluding books is the best solution, though--the most common ones shouldn't be weighted very highly anyway.

I've started to notice this too: the most prominent people on "members with my books" seem to highlight collections where I have a lot of their books (small collections with concentrations in one genre), rather than them having a lot of mine. The "Similar libraries" on my Connections page are a much more interesting crowd.

This is why I would love a 'favourite books' feature so much.

I've got almost all the Terry Pratchet books, as well as two complete sets of Time-Life books, so my 'members with my books' is similarly skewed. The raw set is a bit more helpful, because it doesn't weight by total collection size.

Instead of a 'favorite books' feature, what if the 'similar library' was instead weighted by rating. Being a pack rat, I've got some books that are in my collection that I've rated (or will rate when I get around to it) two or fewer stars, as well as the really good ones that I've rated five stars. That should hold more weight when comparing collections that the fact that I've acquired three Gideon Bibles (and a "Gideon" Book of Mormon) while staying at various hotels over the years.

craigim: Well, the point of the 'favourite books' feature that I'm constantly harping about is that it would function EXACTLY the same way as the 'favourite authors' feature now available.

As for the weighted by rating - many people, including myself do not, and will never use the rating system whatsoever. Others have a personal standard for their ratings. I suppose it could be a minor feature, but the ratings should (and I hope, will) never be mandatory.

I didn't make the connection between 'favorite authors' and 'favorite books'. That does sound like a fun feature.

I'm a bit confused by your strong negative reaction to rating a book, however. Of course I don't think ratings should be mandatory, and I strongly doubt they ever would be.

I personally find it to be a nice way to sort my books in terms of ones I enjoyed or found useful vs. ones I didn't. 5 years from now, if I'm going to make a recommendation to a friend, I'd like to be able to pull up a list of all my five and four star books. Similarly, around Christmas or birthday time, I'd like to be able to point someone to my library so that they can see what I've already got and what I really enjoyed reading.

If I were designing a weighting system for comparing libraries, I'd do it something like this:

If I shared a book in my library with you, and one or both of us had left it unrated, it would get a score of '1' (unweighted). Thus, if you hadn't rated any of your books, the behavior would be unchanged.

If, however, we had both rated it, then how closely we felt about the book would give it more weight in the similarity index. For instance, if we both rated a book 1 star, that would score, say, a '3'. If I rated a book a 1/2 and you rated it a five, then the score would be '0', because even though we both have it in our collection, we have very different opinions about it.

Yes, I do try to sneak the 'favourite books' topic into as many threads as possible!

I'm sorry if we got our wires crossed: I'm not opposed to anyone rating books at all. I just know that many people (including myself) don't care very much for the rating system. (It's simply impossible for me to compare books like that - too one-dimensional and static. Also: the genre issue.)

The problem with ratings being the main data source for the 'similar libraries' feature is just that; the ratings feature simply isn't used by enough people.

Yeah, ratings are, by definition, 1-D. So while The Elements of Nonlinear Optics is five star because it's a very useful book on the subject although I would never recommend reading it cover-to-cover, The Illuminatus! Trilogy gets five stars because it's my favorite novel and I re-read it once every couple of years.

Then, too, favorite author is also 1-D. I enjoy Pratchet for different reasons than I enjoy Richard Feynman. In fact, favorite author is less than 1-D because it's binary. The author (or book) is either one of my favorites or it isn't. But I liked a 5 star book a little more than a 4 star book, and I hated a 1 star book.

As for ratings being the main source, I certainly don't rate all my books, both because many of them I've had for so long that I don't completely remember exactly how I feel about them, and because I just don't have that strong a feeling for many of them. Besides, how do you rate Webster's dictionary?

I still think the best results would come from adjusting the formula that already exists for similar libraries. Favourites are just too limited when we could be working with a whole library of data. Favourite books might be an interesting additional feature, but I don't think it's a replacement for fixing the similar libraries algorithm.

Edited, after looking more closely at the users on the Connections page, to say: It wouldn't even require any effort to tweak the formula, it could just be flat-out replaced with whatever one's being used on the Connections page!

Hmmm...

I went here to post about the very same thing people were talking about here (in September).

I use the "Members with your books" section to browse other libraries with similar tastes and see if there is something I have not read I would be interested in reading

It would be nice to have a checkbox or something that says "do not include in Members with my books."

The problem is this. The top weighted member in my list has 24 of the same books as I, in a library of 68. That's pretty impressive, and would be a good indicator that the member has similar tastes except...

all 24 of those books are in a Time Life World War II series. Were I to have a "do not include in Members with my books." checkbox, I could check 23 of these 24 volumes and it would change the weighting process.

Or if I only had 1 Harold Potter book checked, or all editions I have of Strunk and White- the Elements of Style checked (shared users who own this common textbook may have absolutely NOTHING in common with me).

Is this possible? Or worth it?

Another possibility came to mind that might be easier to program, (I don't know if it would or not)

If there were an option to disregard works in the Members with my books section with more than n copies in member's libraries, this would solve the Agatha Christie/JK Rowling issue.

Harry potter clocks in at about 25,000 for each work, Tolkien at about 10,000. Shakespeare, Homer, Bronte, CS Lewis, Alcott and Strunk and White would all disappear at about 6000 member libraries sharing.

I am much more interested in someone's library that shares works like Finding the Walls of Troy with me (43 members have this) than libraries that share The Odyssey. 10,000 other LTrs have it. It is too common.

This wouldn't solve my Time Life World War II problem, but it would make a lot of the smaller libraries that aren't really similar disappear from the top of the Members with my books section.

Someone somewhere suggested something that might help. For a certain group of books (like a series), the first shared book would count as a whole one; the second would count as 1/2 a book, the third as 1/3, and so on. So there would be a little weight to sharing books in a series, but further books in the same series would count progressively less.

I've always thought adding in unique authors would help as well. I have a large set of Louis L'Amour and Agatha Christie books and a bunch of small libraries that only match on one author or the other.