At last month’s London Book Fair special presentation on “The Data Dilemma,” Jim Bryant, Founder and CEO of Trajectory, Inc., noted that, “book discovery is one of the biggest problems facing publishing.”
An intelligent network connecting publishers to retailers, libraries and readers around the world, Trajectory is the first company to develop an algorithmic recommendation system for books, Bryant said.
“Using techniques like sentiment analysis which give a score to positive words like ‘outstanding’ [+5] and negative words like ‘catastrophe’ [-5], we try to create a personality for each book that can be expressed visually in a cloud of key words,” he explained. “This cloud is particularly useful for book discovery when a book is translated into other languages. It allows us to find the closest matching books to recommend to readers rather than by analyzing behavior, which most of retail uses.”
In 2015, Trajectory received the Book Industry Study Group’s Innovation Award.
A full video, including slides, is viewable here.
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