Match BookGuides to choosing books
How to pick a book you'll actually finish, what your own ratings say about your taste, and how the recommendation machinery behind book sites really works. There's a little data science along the way, all of it explained plainly.
How to choose your next book: five questions that beat a bestseller list
A practical way to pick a book you'll actually finish: mood, attention, length, the pattern in your favourites, and how much risk you want.
6 min read
Your five-star books have a pattern: find your reading taste in your own ratings
A plain-English method, with the data science explained, for turning your Goodreads ratings into a description of your taste: weighting, base rates, lift and the traps.
8 min read
The 15 dimensions of a book: what makes two books feel alike
Mood, pace, tone, length, ending and ten more. What each dimension measures, why it matters, and how common each value is in real reading.
8 min read
Reading by mood: why how a book feels matters more than its genre
Cosy, tense, dark, eerie, funny, melancholy: a guide to choosing books by mood, when each one fits, and how pace and ending change the experience.
6 min read
How book recommendations work: popularity, “readers also liked”, and content matching
The three ways book sites recommend books, in plain English: what each is good at, where each fails, and where language models fit in.
7 min read
Explore or exploit? What the maths of slot machines says about choosing books
The multi-armed bandit problem, explained for readers: when to pick a safe favourite, when to gamble on something new, and how to experiment one dimension at a time.
7 min read
Why the same books follow you everywhere, and how to find hidden gems
Popularity bias, the long tail and why star averages mislead, explained plainly, with a method for finding lesser-known books that actually fit your taste.
6 min read
How to export your Goodreads library (including on iPhone)
Step-by-step: download your whole Goodreads library as a CSV on a computer or an iPhone, what each column means, and what to do if the export link never appears.
4 min read
Or skip straight to the books, sorted by how they read.
Want matches for your own taste?
Match Book for iPhone reads the books you gave five stars on Goodreads, works out what they have in common across these fifteen dimensions, and finds more books that share it. Free, no account, no subscription.