Reading, discovering new authors, books and genres can be very exciting. It’s like travelling, visiting new places and meeting new people. I’ve been browsing around the Internet, and I stumbled upon a very interesting website called the “Literature-Map”. You might already know about it, but I thought it’s still worth a share as it presents a really cool way to discover new books and authors!
Going Down the Rabbit Hole: Discover New Authors
When you open this literature-map website, it will actually become very self-explanatory. Here’s an example on how to use it, just in case!
Open up the website, and you’ll see an uncomplicated web-form that will be the start of your author discovery journey. I’ve typed in “Tolkien” as he’s one of my favourite authors. And voila! You see the generated visual map of the author selected.
My example shows what others, who read Tolkien, read. In this case, I see authors such as G.R.R. Martin, C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury and others.
Let yourself go down that rabbit hole. Click on the next author, and you’ll see other author-maps. What a great way to travel along and discover new authors.
Discover New Authors with Gnooks
There’s another fun way to discover new authors – check out the Gnooks discovery project. Again, you’ll find a very simple web form where you can type up to three authors you like.
For example, I’ll type in J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit”, “The Silmarillion”, and “The Lord of the Rings”; Ruta Sepetys, the author of “Salt to the Sea” and Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre. All three are very different authors. Very curious to see what I will discover! Here it goes! Based on my suggestions Gnod AI suggests Ronald Balson as someone whom I could find interesting.
So, you can continue your journey, finding new authors. Simply click whether you like the prediction, don’t like it or don’t know.
Global Network of Discovery
How does this magic work? This is a GNOD – Global Network of Discovery – project. You might have come across their music-, movies- or even art-maps built in a similar way. What is Gnod you ask… This is where AI can shine. Gnod is a self-learning system; it’s getting insights from what visitors like or dislike.
Typical search engines like Google will show you results one way, but you can also treat Gnod as a type of search engine. For instance, use it to discover new authors you might like. It contains thousands of authors, and the more people use it, the better recommendations and predictions you might get in the future.
Continue Your Discovery Journey
I’ve definitely learned something new today. New authors to google and read more about, see what they write, and discover books that might catch my eye. I hope you’ll have as much fun as I did!
