Are you looking for a new book to read? There are two ways to do it. One is to browse lists and rankings of all kinds, read the reviews, or follow friends’ recommendations. The other way is to use clever recommendation tools that let discover books in a refreshingly different way.
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Recommend Me a Book is one of such tools. It’s 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 (is it the book you thought it was?). Plus, there are quick links to the book’s product page in Amazon stores in the US and UK.
To narrow down the selection of books, you can pick up your favorite genre. Simply, 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 website, you’ll see the first page of a book randomly picked for you from a list of popular titles. Over 300 books are available at the moment.
You can find the opening paragraphs 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 all books 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.
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 a few weeks earlier.
The last thing to note is that the website is mobile friendly, and you can easily open it and read the books on your tablet or a cell phone.
Via Life Hacker.
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