Recommend Me a Book is a minimalist, reader-friendly service that shows visitors the first page of a random book.
The catch is that the cover, title, and author can be revealed only when you reach the end of the text.
If you don’t like the opening page of the current book, you can quickly switch to the next one by hitting the “Next Book” button at the top of the text. When you click on it, you’ll see the cover (and compare it to which book you think it is). Plus, there are quick links to the book’s product page on Amazon stores in the US and UK.
To narrow down the selection of books, you can also pick up your favorite genre. Click or tap “Genre” text on the right side of the menu bar. You will be able to choose from 25 categories, including literary fiction, mystery, children’s books, young adult, biographies, but also inspirational and self-help books.
The good thing is that you can save the current genre in your browser. Next time you visit the website, you’ll see only the first pages of books included in this category.
When you enter Recommend Me a Book service, the text is randomly picked for you from a list of popular titles. Over 300 books are available at the moment. You can find the first lines from Franz Kafka’s The Trial and dozens of other public domain classics.
Contemporary books are on the list, as well. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are among the featured titles. You can browse them all by clicking “Pick a Cover” text in the menu bar (but the whole fun from guessing the books is gone, isn’t it?).
When you add Recommend Me a Book as a bookmark in your browser and place it, for instance, in the bookmarks bar, you can come back to it every time you need a bit of rest.
I think the service would work even better if it had a browser extension displaying a random first page of a book every time you open a new tab. It would be equally helpful as 100 Million Books we described some time ago.
Via Life Hacker.
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