A couple of years ago, I worked on a project that included building a recommendation engine for books. It seemed like a worthy goal until I looked at my bedside table, which was covered with books I hadn’t read yet. And the floor around the table. And my home office desk. And my desk at work.

Discovery didn’t seem like much of an issue — I could easily find far more titles than I’d ever have time to read. I buy and read books in hardback, paperback, Kindle, ePub and occasionally PDF.

Recently though, a new project has forced me to consider exactly how I decide what to read and how to read it.

I’ve usually thought about purchase decisions in terms of the traditional AIDA marketing path:

Awareness > Interest > Desire > Action

Andrew Rhomberg, writing for Digital Book World, goes a bit deeper, breaking down Awareness into contexts:

• Social (word-of-mouth, social media)
• Algorithmic (recommendation engine like Amazon, Pandora, Netflix)
• Distributed (reviews, blogs, at conferences)
• Incentivized (sales, co-op, promotions, freebies)

I like the first three, but I think ‘Distributed’ could be broken down even further. Book reviews, book end-notes, blogger mentions, etc. offer, in my mind, different kinds of recommendations. I like them all.

 

 

via Andrew Rhomberg and Digital Book World