A profile- and community-driven book recommender system

Book lovers often struggle to find something new to read. The choice of possible books to read can be overwhelming and confusing, making this subjective decision-making process quite difficult. Searching the Internet we often stumble upon opinions and book ratings of people who are strangers to us. We do not know what their favorite categories, authors, publishers and taste in books are, nor whether we should trust them. As a possible solution to the above mentioned problems, we present Pickbooks - a Web application that is partly a social network and partly a book database. It integrates the social aspects of today´s popular social networks into a book recommender system, and not the other way around. It features book recommendation based on previously read books or personal preferences. It allows users to message and follow people they like, see their updates, reviews and get recommendations from them, and vice versa. The users are encouraged to rate a book they have read before, as those ratings affect the global lists of top rated and currently popular books. There are other features which are in the works and will allow us to further improve the presented application and attract more audience.