New Recommendations!

The LibraryThing developers have released two new features:

1. A major rewrite and update to our personal Recommendations feature
2. A "Simple Add Books" option, currently only visible on our new Recommendations feature.

This post is about the Recommendation feature. For the "Simple Add Books" feature, see this talk post https://www.librarything.com/topic/346585 .

Unfortunately, if your recommendations are not yet calculated, it may take some time before we generate them for you. We pre-generated 5,000 of our most frequent members; others may wait, from minutes to even hours.

You can see the new recommendations here: New recommendations ( https://www.librarything.com/recommendations )

Here's what it looks like:


What's New

* We think the recommendations are better. But they won't be for everyone. We're looking for feedback on what works for you, and what doesn't!
* The "old" recommendations remain, now branded as "Classic." You can find them here:
https://www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME/recommendations.
* The look and feel are substantially different—we think better. But there are "view" options on the top-right of the list, so you can change it back to a numbered list if you prefer.
* The new recommendations include "New Books" and "All-Time" ones. We are particularly proud of the former, as we've never done that well. ("New Books" is currently defined as books published within the last 18 months.)
* The new recommendations are split by genres, with a "Combined Recommendations" option that brings them together.
* You can now dismiss recommendations in several ways—individually, individually by genre and all books by an author.
* You can now add books to your library or wishlist right on the recommendations page. This is the "Simple Add Books" feature discussed on Talk here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346585

How they work

The old recommendations were an aggregate of all the recommendations on all the books in your library. This was a fast method, leveraging other calculations we made, but the aggregate wasn't always the best.

The new ones are based instead on members who share your books. In fact, we go a step further, basing them on members who shared your books within particular genres. This is so that someone who shares your love of high fantasy, but not knitting, is only generating high-fantasy recommendations.

The upshot of this is that the new recommendations take a LOT of time and processing to make. We will be working to make them faster—and generate them more frequently.

There are some limitations now:

* The new recommendations are currently only generated if you have more than 100 books in your library.
* Even if you have 100 books, you need to have 10 books in a genre before it will make recommendations for it.
* Even if you HAVE 10 books in a genre, it still might not give you recommendations. Basically, if your books don't "cluster" well, producing a set of members who like the same books, it might not make recommendations for you.

What doesn't work

* We're not yet keeping track of which recommendations you've seen, and which you haven't, and what's new and what's old.
* The "Recent Automatic Recommendations" on your home page still reflect the old recommendations.

Features we are considering

* I'd like to let members choose what "New Books" means, with options from 3 years to 6 months.
* I'd like to give you an option to exclude certain genres, or at least kid's books, from your combined recommendations.
* You can't currently send people your recommendations page; we are working on that.

Kudos

This was a group project, pulling in all our developers—myself, Lucy (knerd.knitter), Chris (conceptDawg), Chris (ccatalfo) and Rebecca (rebeccaamax). I wanted this out by Christmas.

Let us know what you think!

First: I love this update! The new recs are so much more attractive. I love the summaries view. The usability is smooth. The "Simple Add Books" is fantastic.

I was asked to bring this up on this thread, once new recs was pushed: I want to see more specific genres… 3/7 of mine are for kids. Even if I don’t have any books cataloged in a genre I still want to look at general recs for each genre. I would argue that I need recs even more if I’m looking to break into a new genre where I haven't read/cataloged many books. Give me a "Dora the Explorer" option. :)

I cannot see mine yet (patiently waiting for them) so strictly based on the screenshots - the filter "Remove Authors Held" seems to be only there for the classic recommendations. Is that filter going to be available for the new system (I don't see it above thus the question)?

PS: Ah, here they are. As expected, they are overwhelmed by the authors I already have in my library and I cannot see a way to filter them out. Am I missing it somewhere and if not any chance of adding the ability to filter them out as an option?

>3 AnnieMod: We may implement that filter eventually. But for now, you can dismiss all recommendations by a specific author by clicking the dismiss button on a recommendation and then selecting Dismiss Author.

>4 knerd.knitter: Ah, that's where this is hiding. Is there a way to restore a book or especially an author you dismissed by mistake (or change your mind on)?

And I'd still love a filter (if you are taking requests) - sometimes you may want to see the new books by "your authors" in the mix, sometimes you are looking for books from new names. With the dismissal, you need to decide how you are going to use your recommendations once and stick with it; a filter gives you flexibility. :)

I will go explore and compare the new and old list now.

I have a yellow 1 up on the top indicating a message, but there isn't one although in messages it's indicated that I have one. My personal recs have loaded, but the yellow 1 persists.

While the simple add is a nice addition, I rarely looked at the recommendations before. Just because multiple people have and like a book didn't always mean I would. Are ratings or read dates being taken into account on any of this?

For instance if someone read say the first book of Game of Throne, two years ago, with a 1 star rating, I doubt they'd want the second book or any other books in the series recommended.

ETA: The other thing I am missing is the "Why was this recommended" link. What books are triggering a suggestion. I got a whole block of business books being recommended, but I want to know why.

I get 5 pages of "New Books" recommendations, and page-for-page, they are the most useful recommendations I've ever gotten from LT!

"Graphic Novels and Comics" recs seem a little indiscriminate somehow; certainly not as well-targeted as my "Religion & Spirtuality" recs.

I guess it really helps that my own library is large and well-defined, but these new recommendations pages are more like browsing a bookstore curated to my tastes than anything else I've seen on the 'net.

>7 gilroy: Yep, I was just trying to find the "Why" as well. It was very useful for figuring out why a book was recommended and if I want to look at it just now or if the cluster it came with is one I am not interested in at the moment (or ever - in which case some books may go into my "dont' use for recommendations" collections.

>5 AnnieMod: Oh, I like the idea of a way to see *just* new books by my authors.

>6 Bookmarque: I have a yellow 1 up on the top indicating a message, but there isn't one although in messages it's indicated that I have one. My personal recs have loaded, but the yellow 1 persists.

It should be gone now. Believe it or not, "timspaling" (misspelled) sent you a message that your recs were ready. I've never made that mistake before; I guess I know what it does now!

Me: I don't need any more books, my TBR is long enough as it is.
Also me: Oooh, new recommendations! And pretty covers!!

I am impressed, I got a lot of books I've never heard of that actually seem relevant to my interests and likes. (The Religion & Spirituality recommendations are especially good/interesting, I feel like theology recs are harder than say, mysteries.) Usually recommendation systems either give me stuff I'm aware of already or stuff that I can't figure out why the system thinks I would like it.

It would be interesting to see why a book was recommended, although I suppose that might not be easy since you're incorporating more data into these than just books we already have.

One thing I noticed, if I dismiss a recommendation, once the dismiss popup goes away, it returns me to the top of that page of recommendations and I have to scroll back down to where I left off. Any way to make it remember where I stopped and leave me there?

>10 ablachly: Yeah - maybe a filter of "My authors", "Not my authors" (with better labels possibly) with the ability to chose both or either. That covers all use cases. :)

The classic ones allow you to chose either all or to exclude your authors but not to only see your authors. And as we are talking ponies... :)

>13 AnnieMod: Ooo, can I add a pony to that filter request? "Not this series"
I know I have a few authors where I like one series but can't stand another, so I'd like a chance to filter out a specific series without eliminating the entire author.

>14 gilroy: Coming here to request the same thing. Especially helpful to me as a manga fan, where I might not want to be recommended volume 45 of a series I know I don't like, but maybe I'd like to read a different series by the same author.

>12 casvelyn: Fixed the scrolling problem after dismissing recommendation.

I really like the new recommendations! I especially like the second view with the description on the side

Question: How are they sorted, especially when looking at all books? Are the first ones the best recommendations for me?

>17 sturlington:

Within genres they are—in theory—organized with the best first. But the calculations won't differ much within the first dozen or so, or even the first page.

Within the "Combined Recommendations" it's basically doing a round-robin of your genres, from your most-held genre to your least, and then mixing things up a little.

>14 gilroy: I would love this option!

This new version is still an improvement and I like it. ETA: Really, good job on the "new books" by genre. Thumbs up.

Devastated to find out I'm not in the top 5000 most frequent users, I guess everyone needs to get me more books for Christmas

I mean, great googly-moogly, folks, these recommendations are On. The. Money.

This is lovely, and the recommendations seem good. But I would echo the request by >14 gilroy: to add a "Not this series" filter. A couple of my favorite authors write multiple series, but I'm only interested in one from each of them.

It's a success for me. One glance at the page and I've added two books to my wishlist and it looks like one of my preferred authors has a new book out.

I have never used the recommendations page because I have over 200 books on my Kindle TBR stack. The new page looks great. Love the colorful covers and they seem to be more my style. I would like to be able to filter out the genres that I would never read if possible. I think someone else asked for this too. Just adding my vote to that feature. Thanks for all the hard work of the LT team.

This is a really nice Christmas present. A big improvement on the Automatic Recommendations.

Thank you.

Just wanted to say I had fun with the page generated while waiting for my recs to be calculated,. Wish I could browse most of those. As it is I don't know how were Cheese Problems Solved, why Being Dead Is No Excuse or how to Bombproof Your Horse, among other things :D

These look like very good recommendations -- decidedly a step up in quality compared to the "classic" list. Thanks!

>1 timspalding:
You can't currently send people your recommendations page; we are working on that.

Will this work for private libraries, too?

And since other members are doing it, I'll also add a request for a pony: filtering by language. Sometimes I want recommendations for recent literature in French (or whatever), and a browsable list of majority-French-language Works (or perhaps works whose original language is set to French) would be very useful -- especially if they're such high-quality recommendations.

A success for me, with recommendations including a lot of the books on my “wish list”, so that I am interested to follow up on the others.
Many thanks.

Some stream of consciousness reactions:

>1 timspalding: The first thing I notice is that this change has somehow made the old recommendation system slower to load, even without including the extra step now needed to load it.

Other than that, I haven't seen the new recommendations. Perhaps mine will have been calculated in a day or two ;-(

I very much want to compare the results of the new system with the results of the old system. That's IMO the most important thing - which recommendations produce more reads I love, and which produce more books returned to the library unfinished.

I freely admit that I'm worried that this will be worse for me than what you already had. I'm not especially interested in new books. I prefer retro UIs to imitation cell phone UIs, with large pictures of book covers and small, harder to read titles and authors.

I do like the idea of genre splits. I've been using "filter by other members tags" with the old system to get something like that effect - if I'm in the mood for fiction, or science fiction, or history. But I'd like to be able to get a combination of all recommendations for fiction, or for non-fiction, without the others. Better yet, let me select which genres I want combined.

I'm going to be less than pleased if I get classics recommended as new books, just because someone's published yet another edition. Unless perhaps it's a new translation of something originally written in a different language.

Looks pretty good, though I haven’t looked super carefully.

One thing I’d like to add is that along with the “add” and “dismiss” buttons, I’d like to have (as I’ve mentioned on another update thread recently) a button that notes the title as “interesting” or “worth checking out” or similar. Basically I want to be able to make a note of books that sound sort of interesting and I’d like to be able to look into more, but I don’t want to add them to my library or wish list (I’m more stringent about that).

>7 gilroy: Oh my - I'd missed that this was gone. "Why was this recommended" is hugely important for the way I use the recommendations.

Basically, the fastest way to determine what some random book is like is to see which books the system thinks go with it. That's got a lot more nuance than mere genres. It can tell me either that I'm not in the mood for that book right now (often a matter of "heavy" vs "light" reading) or even that I'll never want to read it.

The alternative would be to read a whole bunch of reviews, which would take a lot longer.

>14 gilroy: I want the same pony - selection by series.

And while you're at it, when you recommend volume 17 of a series where I only have 1,2 and 3 in my library, or have none at all, please make it prominently clear that the book recommended is not the start of the series.

And yes, I agree that's even more of a pony ;-)

>27 Petroglyph: I'd like this pony too - though so far, Library Thing has never recommended me anything not in English. (At a guess, I haven't added enough non-English books to my library yet.)

>1 timspalding: A question about New vs. All: How does this work with translations? If the book is originally in Spanish and has copies in Spanish in the system with dates as far back as 1980 for example and it gets its first English translation now, will this count as a new book for the recommendations?

New translations will be always tricky so that’s mostly about first translations - does the New takes into consideration the age of the whole work or the age of the work in the language it is looking to make recommendations for?

I never used the old recommendations system but I love the "dismiss author" option in the new one, whether it existed before or not, though I don't recall ever seeing it when poking around. That was always a big pain point on GR for a lot of my friends. Is there a list somewhere in our account/profile of authors/books we've dismissed? Can it be undone?

If you have genres disabled on your account (like I do) what happens when you click "Wrong Genre"..what exactly is it looking at?

I miss the "why" also, and I also wish that, as with the old recommendations, we could see right away how many members have the book, how many reviews it has, and the average rating.

That's an excellent copy of my current to be read list!

I'm really rather impressed with the new LT2 recommendations feature. (it's not just a shift in the interface, is it?) The titles were largely on point with my interests and the process is intuitive as well as quick in determining whether to add something to my library or just to my wish list. Also the system generated my new recommendations in timely fashion (in well under a half hour, I think).

>14 gilroy: I'd like this option, too! I have the same problem - for example, I like M.C. Beaton's Hamish MacBeth series, but hate her Agatha Raisin series and since I have most of the Hamish books, it's recommending a lot of Agatha to me.

I want to understand "wrong genre" - does it mean the book is in the wrong genre or that I don't want to see anything from that genre or something else?

I do think this is a big improvement and I'm having fun playing with it.

I think it's genius to be able to add to wishlist directly without having to go to another page and I also think it's lovely to be able to filter my recommendations by genre. Great job!

Brilliant work and a great Christmas present. Thanks for all the hard work!

A follow-up to my #38 above. I really wish that the wishlist items did not show up as being a part of my library. They're not!!! They are things I want to add in future. MY LIBRARY should only contain those titles I own and/or have read. (Others, of course, may not use LT in this fashion, but it's a real barrier to my use of the WishList opportunity.)

Looks nice, and from a first glance around I get the impression that the actual recommendations are relevant and not entirely predictable, so it could be useful. And expensive…

Intuitively, it feels as though clicking the genre buttons up at the top should give you the option to exclude that genre (temporarily) as well as to focus on it, but I guess that’s for the longer term.

>34 AnnieMod: I’m getting a recommendation for an English version of Mémoires d’outre-tombe as “recent”, so it’s obviously just picking up translations published in the last three years. Unless Chateaubriand is still churning them out…

Ideally, we would need filters for (original) language to get around the translation problem (people who only read in English want to see new translations into English from X, the rest of us want to see new books in language X), but not many LT sources populate the original language field correctly, so the data would probably not be good enough to be any use.

These are fantastic! If only they came with money to buy the new titles you're introducing me to! Like others, I'd like to be able to exclude kids' books & as a vegan, most of the cookbooks are useless, so it'd be nice to be able to cut a subgenre, but generally, bravo & thank you!

Initial impression is that it’s scarily good for some genres, notably Nature & Science in my case, more dull/predictable for others, e.g. there’s limited use in recommending me Ospreys, I know they exist for just about everything mil-hist, and so does presumably anyone with as many as I’ve got.

>44 susanbooks:

Money would be nice, but what I could really use is that one to read them all!

Does the new system give equal weight to all genres? Suppose e.g. I have 10 historical fiction and 1000 science fiction in my library; is it going to give me roughly the same number of each? And what is it going to do with the many many books that get listed as multiple genres?

I'm asking this because my recommendations in the new system have way more recent US politics than I'd ever want to read (not sure what genre(s) that would be) and I'm finding the pictures of POTUS 45 on multiple covers low grade "triggering". (No, not a real trigger. But I dislike that person enough to become mildly more grumpy when repeatedly shown pictures of him.)

On the other hand, another genre that's in my library doesn't seem to appear in my recommendations at all. Does the system give more weight to recently added books, such that the location of books in my physical library affects whether similar books get recommended? (I've been slowly cataloguing my books for several years.)

Related to that, I think it's missing some nuance that was either in the older system, or available from that system by using "why?". I don't want just any old book about the divisions in US politics, and particularly don't want yet another book relating history I lived through.

Finally, I can see that I'm really going to miss recommendations by date - aka recently added recommendations. Once I've picked over the list a few times, it will be full of books I'd be happy to read, but feel no urgency for - I don't want to go through that same list again and again looking for books to rocket to the head of my reading queue. Checking for new (as in, recently published) books will ameliorate some of that, but using this as a workaround will tend to result in me never seeing new recommendations that aren't also newly published.

In addition to having a dismiss this series button, I'd love to have a way to explore backlist titles by having older dates. Very often there's a big wait at the library for frontlist, but books just a few years old have no wait. Just a thought.

My new recommendations are right on the money! I can see my library holds list exploding...

I would like to be able to do more with the genres -- include/exclude certain ones. Being able to look at them one at a time is good, but I can see how it might be handy to be able to look at certain ones (e.g. maybe I'm in the mood for mystery or science fiction, but not so much romance or historical fiction right now).

I almost exclusively read books in German (and in eBook format on an eReader). So recommendations in languages ​​other than German are not very interesting for me. I could imagine that this will also be the case for readers who read books outside of the English-speaking area.
In addition to the filters already mentioned, I would like to be able to further restrict the display of recommended books. Possible filters could be:
- Books of one or more languages
- Books only in the original language, or only in translations, or both.
- Books of one or more formats such as hardcover, paperback, eBooks, audiobooks
- other?

>43 thorold: Thanks. I did not see any translations in mine (none that were not new enough in the original as well anyway) so had to ask. :)

>42 jillmwo: I believe that has been a running argument regarding the Wishlist collection since it was implemented. (And also a reason I refuse to use it.)

>42 jillmwo: I really wish that the wishlist items did not show up as being a part of my library. They're not!!! They are things I want to add in future.

The Collections basis of the Wishlist works very well for this, as long as you understand your owned books to be those in the "My Library" collection. I have no overlap between my Wishlist and My Library. Other collections excluded from My Library are "Borrowed" and "Read but Unowned." If, on the other hand, you want your whole catalog (i.e. "All collections") to be limited to books you own, then there is no place for a wishlist or those other categories.

>53 paradoxosalpha: That's fine, but there are certain features such as books you should borrow or almost all of the zeitgeist pages that don't allow you to exclude the wishlist collection.

Okay, here are lots of comments. Note, however, that it's Friday, so not a lot of development is going to happen on this before Monday. And, well, next week is Christmas week, so I don't know how much will get done then either.

ETA: It's Saturday. This took a long time to respond to. Sorry for all the text!

>5 AnnieMod: Is there a way to restore a book or especially an author you dismissed by mistake (or change your mind on)?

Not now, but we have a phase two for recommendations coming soon, and it will include a link to see everything you've dismissed.

And I'd still love a filter (if you are taking requests) - sometimes you may want to see the new books by "your authors" in the mix, sometimes you are looking for books from new names. With the dismissal, you need to decide how you are going to use your recommendations once and stick with it; a filter gives you flexibility. :)

Yes, this makes sense. We'll respond in some way.

>7 gilroy: Are ratings or read dates being taken into account on any of this?

For instance if someone read say the first book of Game of Throne, two years ago, with a 1 star rating, I doubt they'd want the second book or any other books in the series recommended.

To be honest, ratings are not taken into account. I have a lot of very strong reasons why average ratings aren't useful. Your example—considering only the members' previous rating—has more potential. It would be limited, however, in that LibraryThing's personal recommendations are no longer based on the books you have directly, but rather on pools of users who share your books. We might decide that low-rated books "don't count." But I'm not sure. If I rated Robopocalypse low, I still wanted to read it. I'm not convinced that connecting me with people who have Robopocalypse is necessarily bad. Maybe all of us are optimistic idiots—the kind of people who like that sort of sci-fi, even if we didn't end up liking that one.

>8 paradoxosalpha: I get 5 pages of "New Books" recommendations, and page-for-page, they are the most useful recommendations I've ever gotten from LT!

Thank you. I hope your ears were burning, as I read your comment, along with that of many others, to my wife and kid. :)

>9 AnnieMod: Yep, I was just trying to find the "Why" as well.
>10 ablachly: It would be interesting to see why a book was recommended, although I suppose that might not be easy since you're incorporating more data into these than just books we already have.

Right. The problem with "Why?" here is that the answers used to be "Because you have books X, Y, and Z" and now they are more like "Because the book is held by 23 members who are on your list of members most similar to you in the genre X, as calculated by shared books, adjusted in various ways!"

I will look into ways of saying it. Perhaps we could list some of the accounts that tipped the scales for the book. Or I could try to think about which books are most similar to it within your library, as an approximate answer.

>10 ablachly: Oh, I like the idea of a way to see *just* new books by my authors.
>13 AnnieMod: Yeah - maybe a filter of "My authors", "Not my authors" (with better labels possibly) with the ability to chose both or either. That covers all use cases. :)

Yeah. I think that's a good filter idea—both of them.

>12 casvelyn: I am impressed, I got a lot of books I've never heard of that actually seem relevant to my interests and likes. (The Religion & Spirituality recommendations are especially good/interesting, I feel like theology recs are harder than say, mysteries.) Usually recommendation systems either give me stuff I'm aware of already or stuff that I can't figure out why the system thinks I would like it.

Thank you. It's largely working for me too, but rather better in history than in theology. The problem for me in the latter is that, I tend to overlap with Catholic people on my Catholic books and while I am Catholic, I have little interest in the Catholic devotional books.

>14 gilroy: Ooo, can I add a pony to that filter request? "Not this series"

Yes, we considered that, and rejected it as too fiddly. One worry would be when a work has more than one series. I might, for example, want to dismiss all Dummies Technology books, but by mistake dismiss all Dummies books altogether.

>19 reconditereader: Really, good job on the "new books" by genre. Thumbs up.

Thanks. We realized we needed something like this when we made a feature to approve or reject new books in genres, for a library product that showcases 3-5 books within a genre per month. Pretty much all LT employees have a few genres they curate for this product, and we came to realize the approval page was a GREAT way of finding new books to read. We shall accordingly also be releasing a more general way to explore new titles in your favorite genres.

>20 norabelle414: Devastated to find out I'm not in the top 5000 most frequent users, I guess everyone needs to get me more books for Christmas

>21 JBD1: I mean, great googly-moogly, folks, these recommendations are On. The. Money.

Lisa and Liam appreciated this from you.

>24 perennialreader: I would like to be able to filter out the genres that I would never read if possible.

It gave you recommendations within that genre because you have books LibraryThing thinks are in that genre. But it may be wrong, or wrong in this instance. For example, I have all of C. S. Lewis' religious fiction—adult and child—and, with a few other things, LibraryThing thinks I like "Christian Fiction." But, to be honest, most "Christian Fiction" is of no interest to me. Is that the sort of thing going on? Can you tell us what genre is the problem, and why?

The secondary problem is what sort of control is appropriate. You can turn genres off on your "Settings" page. Would you want to do so? If not, I'm worried about having yet another place to turn off and on genres. It could get quite confusing.

>27 Petroglyph: And since other members are doing it, I'll also add a request for a pony: filtering by language.

You mentioned French. Do you browse the site in French, or are you just interested in French? LibraryThing's "work" concept doesn't really admit of the concept of books "in" French. Would you want only books *originally* in French? Etc.

>29 ArlieS: The first thing I notice is that this change has somehow made the old recommendation system slower to load, even without including the extra step now needed to load it.

Honestly, I don't think so. I think it's a coincidence for you.

I prefer retro UIs to imitation cell phone UIs, with large pictures of book covers and small, harder to read titles and authors.

There's a list mode for you, with everything reduced to just text.

I'm going to be less than pleased if I get classics recommended as new books, just because someone's published yet another edition. Unless perhaps it's a new translation of something originally written in a different language.

Because it's about the first publication of the work, this shouldn't happen. It will probably happen from time to time, if classic editions start out as separate works.

>32 ArlieS: And while you're at it, when you recommend volume 17 of a series where I only have 1,2 and 3 in my library, or have none at all, please make it prominently clear that the book recommended is not the start of the series.

The new system doesn't really do much with series. It could exclude (or penalize) all books in a series other than the NEXT one. But series differ a good deal in the degree to which they can, should or must be read in order. It's a tricky problem.

>34 AnnieMod: A question about New vs. All: How does this work with translations? If the book is originally in Spanish and has copies in Spanish in the system with dates as far back as 1980 for example and it gets its first English translation now, will this count as a new book for the recommendations?

It's all done on the work level. So a new translation is not counted as new, unless the new one hasn't been combined yet.

As elsewhere, the edition you are shown is the best one for your site. So if you're on LibraryThing.fr many of the recommendations will be in French, but some will be in English because it knows of no French edition of the title.

>35 Taliesien: Is there a list somewhere in our account/profile of authors/books we've dismissed? Can it be undone?

We'll be working on access to this list.

>37 Aquila: That's an excellent copy of my current to be read list!

We didn't cheat! :)

>38 jillmwo: Also the system generated my new recommendations in timely fashion (in well under a half hour, I think).

I find it a little funny you think that's timely. I was scared as heck to release a feature that wasn't instant, but the fact is that I couldn't calculate all members before Christmas. I am glad members see the time as evidence it's working hard--and it is!--not that we are bad at programming.

FWIW, it's amazing how much calculation it has to do. I'm quite sure your average member uses more CPU power getting their list of YA novels than NASA expended on every computer it had and every mission it launched until the 70s ;)

>39 tardis: I want to understand "wrong genre" - does it mean the book is in the wrong genre or that I don't want to see anything from that genre or something else?

It's designed for cases where a book is recommended in the history genre, but it's not history.

>42 jillmwo: A follow-up to my #38 above. I really wish that the wishlist items did not show up as being a part of my library. They're not!!! They are things I want to add in future. MY LIBRARY should only contain those titles I do not own. (Others, of course, may not use LT in this fashion, but it's a real barrier to my use of the WishList opportunity.)

I'll write another post about this soon.

>45 AndreasJ: Initial impression is that it’s scarily good for some genres, notably Nature & Science in my case, more dull/predictable for others, e.g. there’s limited use in recommending me Ospreys, I know they exist for just about everything mil-hist, and so does presumably anyone with as many as I’ve got.

I think this is a good argument for either or both of (1) a series-dismiss button, or (2) throttling series you already have somewhat.

>47 ArlieS: Does the new system give equal weight to all genres? Suppose e.g. I have 10 historical fiction and 1000 science fiction in my library; is it going to give me roughly the same number of each?

Each genre list is it's own beast. The "Combined Recommendations" list is a mish-mash. Honestly, I didn't want to make it, but I was convinced. It mixes the various genres together in proportion to how many books you have within that genre, adjusted down somewhat. (Actual calcuation: The percent of each genre, but using the number of books in the genre raised to the power of 0.4! Why 0.4? Because I played around a lot with it, and 0.4 seemed to give me a good mix, but heavier on the genres I care about.)

And what is it going to do with the many many books that get listed as multiple genres?

It's complicated. When two genres recommend a book it sometimes drops it from the one it's lower-down the genre list on. For example almost all biography is also history, but that would be boring. So it drops it from the history list.

I'm asking this because my recommendations in the new system have way more recent US politics than I'd ever want to read (not sure what genre(s) that would be) and I'm finding the pictures of POTUS 45 on multiple covers low grade "triggering". (No, not a real trigger. But I dislike that person enough to become mildly more grumpy when repeatedly shown pictures of him.)

Thanks for the info. I'll take a look at what's going on. My guess is that whatever politics books you have are held by people who have an interest in US politics that you dont' share.

On the other hand, another genre that's in my library doesn't seem to appear in my recommendations at all. Does the system give more weight to recently added books, such that the location of books in my physical library affects whether similar books get recommended? (I've been slowly cataloguing my books for several years.)

It probably couldn't assemble enough information about it. Can you tell me which genre so I can take a look?

Finally, I can see that I'm really going to miss recommendations by date - aka recently added recommendations.

Yes, we'll be adding that back. I didn't want to start with it because, well, it's going to chaos around here for a bit, with stuff entering and exiting as I make changes to the algorithm. But this is certainly needed.

>55 timspalding: Thanks for the long, detailed response.

Note, however, that it's Friday, so not a lot of development is going to happen on this before Monday. And, well, next week is Christmas week, so I don't know how much will get done then either.

Don't worry, your faithful commenters will have produced even more suggestions when you all get back to developing in January ;-)

For instance if someone read say the first book of Game of Throne, two years ago, with a 1 star rating, I doubt they'd want the second book or any other books in the series recommended.

FWIW, I handle this by having a special collection for books I did NOT like. It's not in "My Library". It's flagged not to be used for recommendations. I use it to avoid reacquiring the same disliked book, but it has the nice side effect that books in it will never be recommended - nothing in "all collections" will be. That doesn't prevent the system from recommending me volume 15 of some series where I added the first three to my "reject" category, but in practice that has never happened, at least with the old system.

Thanks for the info. I'll take a look at what's going on. My guess is that whatever politics books you have are held by people who have an interest in US politics that you don't share.

The two works I especially noticed - because of the cover picture - are https://www.librarything.com/work/26787198 and https://www.librarything.com/work/26760420

I played around with the individual genres, and both books appears to be in multiple genres. When I look at new books: both are on the first screen of my combined recommendations; both are in Biography & Memoir - 2nd and 4th in the list. Both are in Politics & Government; the first one's also in History.

On the other hand, another genre that's in my library doesn't seem to appear in my recommendations at all.

It probably couldn't assemble enough information about it. Can you tell me which genre so I can take a look?

The missing genre is Romance. When looking at new books, I didn't spot any to speak of in the combined view. I did get a few when I selected "Romance" on its own. But at least half of those I saw near the top of the list don't look like Romance novels to me - names, cover art, and familiarity with the authors variously suggest science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.

Of course there's a fuzzy line between a mystery story where the hardboiled detective falls in requited love, and a romance which has a mystery to give it a bit of plot outside of bedroom scenes and concern about the relationship. And as I get farther down that list, I do start seeing more normal romance covers and titles.

I am thoroughly impressed that the recommendations for Romance know that I want queer romance. It's not quite there on knowing I really want lesbian romances, but a decent proportion of them are sff (and honestly finding SFF lesbian books that aren't already in my library isn't easy, you are doing well there, new recs).

>7 gilroy: gilroy: Oh my - I'd missed that this was gone. "Why was this recommended" is hugely important for the way I use the recommendations.

>31 ArlieS:: Basically, the fastest way to determine what some random book is like is to see which books the system thinks go with it. That's got a lot more nuance than mere genres. It can tell me either that I'm not in the mood for that book right now (often a matter of "heavy" vs "light" reading) or even that I'll never want to read it.

This was central to my usage of the old recommendations too! That and seeing recent new recommendations based on the latest books i've read. Fortunately the old recommendations are still there, but I'd like this in some form in the new ones too.

I have a question about genres. If people who share a lot of books with me share a prominent book that's not in a genre I have in my collection, will it still get recommended based on the mere weight of those users sharing it? I'm slightly worried about being stuck in some kind of a genre bubble where potentially interesting things never show up in my recommendations because the algorithm judges them as "wrong genre", but to me there isn't necessarily such a thing as "wrong genre". I'd prefer if the algorithm erred on the side of anti-bubble.

This ties in somewhat with my usage of the "Why was this recommended" feature: if a new recommendation appears that has books from visibly different genres in its "why" list, it's a hint that the work may be something unusually interesting and not "more of the same."

>55 timspalding:
perennialreader: I would like to be able to filter out the genres that I would never read if possible.

This would be something i would like too. As well as bad recommendations (see below) there are other external factors that scome in to play. I own quite a few graphic novels but I have stopped buying them (less reading time when I became a parent, and I was buying a lot of comics I wasn't keeping up with), so no recommendation is useful.

It gave you recommendations within that genre because you have books LibraryThing thinks are in that genre. But it may be wrong, or wrong in this instance...Is that the sort of thing going on? Can you tell us what genre is the problem, and why?

I can't speak for perennialreader but for me Music is the problematic genre here. The recommendations read like a list of the worst books in this genre to recommend unless you want them thrown at you.

Why? You are missing a crucial piece of information, my taste in music, and that's going to be hard to get (you would need the data from my record collection) or to make useful recommendations without (and something people can have strong opinions about, likely in relation to the depth of their interest).

The secondary problem is what sort of control is appropriate. You can turn genres off on your "Settings" page. Would you want to do so?

Well no, Music is useful as a genre for me (I shelve music books together) but random recommendations aren't.

It mixes the various genres together in proportion to how many books you have within that genre, adjusted down somewhat. (Actual calcuation: The percent of each genre, but using the number of books in the genre raised to the power of 0.4! Why 0.4? Because I played around a lot with it, and 0.4 seemed to give me a good mix, but heavier on the genres I care about.)

I've done some maths and this seems to be overweighting minority genres quite considerably. Looking at the overlap of the first 200 combined recommendations and the first 200 in each genre.

The overlap for scifi is 12 i.e. its 6% of combined recommendations but only 2.33% of my collection.

The overlap for general fiction is 36 which is 18% of recommendations but 40.25% of my overall collection.

So comparatively I own roughly 17 times as many in the latter but get only 3 times as many recommendations.

When compared to my reading this year this looks even worse. Out of the 99 books so far this I have classified 71 as fiction but only one could really be seen as sci-fi (The librarything genre classification seems to be a bit looser than I would be but this is a typical number).

This seems backwards.

(I should say to the recommendations I want, I like the ones I've looked at lot.)

>59 tallpaul: "Well no, Music is useful as a genre for me (I shelve music books together) but random recommendations aren't."

This sounds like what I said about cookbooks. I want the recs, but as a vegan, most I see are useless, so it would be great to be able to choose or dismiss subgenres. Or, as >57 Aquila: said, yes to lesbian romance, but no to Romance in general.

I've changed some genres in my settings. I will see what that does. I've never had a problem with finding what books to read on my own, so I haven't really used recommendations much.

>55 timspalding:

You mentioned French. Do you browse the site in French, or are you just interested in French? LibraryThing's "work" concept doesn't really admit of the concept of books "in" French. Would you want only books *originally* in French? Etc.

I don't browse the site in French all that often, no. I am interested in filtering recommendations for the languages I want to read in (French, Swedish and a few others), which, I suppose, would indeed mean books originally in French (or whatever).

I'm one of those people who fill out the language section for every single work in their catalogue, but I may be an outlier there. Is there enough data there to have the filter return acceptable results?

(I've just logged in to a few other language versions of LT -- the recommendations look identical. Of course they are: they are based on the same catalogue).

Add me to the list of people who support language-filtering. The language issues on LT is one of my pet peeves.
I only use the English site, but I read books in Swedish as well and have started collecting books i French and German (and will hopefully add a few other languages to the list).

I would like to add my voice to those asking for a series filter. I love the new recommendations, especially by genre, but when I filter by Science Fiction, my recs are swamped out by Star Trek novels. This makes sense; I have hundreds of them. But I don't need them recommended to me for a variety of reasons, and this makes it hard to discover new-to-me science fiction I do want.

>36 lilithcat: The work hover that appears when you mouse over the title does have how many members have the book, how many reviews it has, and the average rating

>65 knerd.knitter:

I'm not seeing anything appear when I do that. (Mac OS Monterey 12.5.1, Firefox 108.0.1)

>66 lilithcat: Do you have the work info boxes disabled in settings? Or are you used to seeing them and can't right now?

>67 knerd.knitter:

Do you have the work info boxes disabled in settings?

That would be it! Back when all that appeared on the work page (it doesn't seem to now?), it ate up so much space that I disabled it. I'd forgotten all about it!

>64 Stevil2001: I would like to add my voice to those asking for a series filter. I love the new recommendations, especially by genre, but when I filter by Science Fiction, my recs are swamped out by Star Trek novels. This makes sense; I have hundreds of them. But I don't need them recommended to me for a variety of reasons, and this makes it hard to discover new-to-me science fiction I do want.

Do you want a series filter, or do you want to dismiss by series?

It's not a problem I face, but I can see the possible utility of "dismiss by series."

>69 timspalding: I guess either would work.

>69 timspalding:

I'm not Stevil2001, nor do I play him on TV, but I'd prefer a filter.

(Generally, I dislike dismissing recs.)

Possible bug: When my new recs calculated, I got four DMs/emails about it within about ten seconds. I don't mind but thought someone might want to know.

>73 Watry:

Oh, shoot. Thanks.

>72 AndreasJ: Count me as another who dislikes dismissing recs. A book has to seem like I'd obviously detest it - not merely not want to read it any time in the next year or two - before I'm comfortable dismissing the rec.

It's hard to tell for sure when I don't recognize most of the books, but the new recommendations seem far less specific than the old version. Are the "use for connections" and "use for recommendations" check-boxes on the collections still active? If not, that could explain much of the difference.

I don't remember the previous recommendations ever being helpful to me, but (on the first day they were released) the new recommendations resulted in me making a purchase at a brick & mortar store: Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen. Admittedly, this wasn't rocket science, since I already owned The Comanche Empire by the same author, but I hadn't noticed the existence of Indigenous Continent without the new recommendations help. So, thanks! (Sincerely!)

I do wish there were a way for the system to productively take into account feedback like "I really hate that book you just recommended".

>77 cpg: Isn't that what dismissing does?

>78 reconditereader: I think it only removes it, not tweaks the algorithm to include fewer books similar to it (which is what I interpret cpg as wishing for -- "take into account feedback").

Are member recommendations going to be converted into this new recommendations format (obviously without the algorithm) ir are they going to stay in the classic format?

>79 anglemark:

Yes, my understanding is that dismissing a recommendation just hides that recommendation, and no inference is made from that action about which other books should be recommended.

I like the "Filter by other members' tags" option on the old recommendations far more than the new genre filter. The genres are too broad to be of much use to me.

>81 cpg:

Yes. I think the dismiss "signal" is weak and ambiguous, so we don't use it for anything.

>80 gilroy:

Member recs can't be entirely in the new format, because they arne't just books but also wording around them. We haven't decided how to do it.

On the new recommendations I can't find the review count or the average rating, and those are the 2 parts I use most when trying to find new books for myself. Maybe they're somewhere and I just can't see them?

timspalding, can you answer eromsted's question in >76 eromsted:? Are the recommendations still just using the collections we have specified to "Use for recommendations" or have we lost that control? (Not that I'm not sure that feature is still needed with the new system, at least not for us.)

>85 ptimes:

I had the same problem, and was reminded to check my settings to see whether I had disabled "work info boxes". I had, and once I enabled it again, I could see that info when I hovered my mouse over the title.

>83 timspalding:

Date?

>88 cpg: Was probably meant to have been "data".

>89 anglemark:

Oh. In light of my #77, I thought it might be "hate"! (But there's nothing "weak" about that for me.)

>86 anglemark:

If that feature doesn't work with the new system, I guess a workaround would be to set up a separate account just for recommendations, if that's within the current Terms of Service.

This is absolutely wonderful; thank you to everyone who worked on this. A good example of why LT is head and shoulders above any similar system. As someone with a relatively large library and an insanely extensive wishlist, I like what I am seeing. My first impression is that the recommendations were much less focused than the classic recommendations, but on looking more closely, I see there is some really interesting stuff in there, especially with respect to new books.
I have 1000 recommendations to look at now; I am not going to jump in and nit-pick until I look deeper. A few comments: (1) I hope the classic recommendations are not going away ; (2) I don't really care about any detailed cataloguing info re books on my wishlist. Print is certainly preferred, apart from that I don't care about anything except author, title and genre ; (3) including the simple add option with classic recommendations as well would be wonderful ;(4) I strongly second those asking for a way to exclude genres, similar to what can be done with the Early Reviewers. E.g. for me, romance, kids books, young adult, probably horror are of little interest

Just a quick followup with respect to the following anomaly, which seems to reflect a quite serious distortion in where my interests lie:
Recommendations:
Mystery: 154
Religion & Spirituality: 13
Genres in My Library (from Charts & Graphs):
Mystery: 70
Religion & Spirituality: 759
Whence comes this ?
My fault: I figured it out. There are far fewer new books under Religion & Spirituality; they were all hiding under All-time. Which makes sense.

>86 anglemark: Are the recommendations still just using the collections we have specified to "Use for recommendations or have we lost that control?

No, it only uses the books that you have marked as for recommendations.

>88 cpg: Date? Dismissal, sorry. Or indeed data.

>94 timspalding:

Cool! I've just used Power Edit to make a Collection consisting of just those items I've rated 5 stars, and I've deselected the "Use for Recommendations" boxes for all of my other collections. So far, the new recommendations look very similar to the ones before I did all this. Maybe it takes some time for the recommendations to be recalculated.

>96 cpg: From what Tim said when this feature was introduced I think recalculating may take a very long time

>87 lilithcat: Hovering doesn't work for those of us accessing LT on a phone

>94 timspalding: Just to be completely clear: is marking for recommendations done in the collections manager (pictured) or somewhere else? If somewhere else, where?

We don't yet have a fully-functioning system for recalculation. But we are working on it.

>100 timspalding:

Yeah, 12 hours later and the recommendations look just the same. Is the workaround mentioned in my #91 permitted?

>101 cpg: Yes, as long as you are not using them fraudulently as sock puppets to manipulate things, there is no ban on having multiple accounts. I have four myself, including one for my wish list.

>100 timspalding: I've added several books to my library since my recommendations were calculated, including at least one that one of the systems recommended. I may add a bunch more today, if I find time to continue cataloguing my history collection. So "no recalculation yet" looks like being one of the (temporary) advantages of sticking with the old system.

Considering the point raised by >103 ArlieS:, a manual trigger for recalculation might be a real benefit. Something in the header like, "Recommendations last calculated on (DATE). Recalculate?" Since the load is heavy, it could even set expectations like: "Fresh recommendations may take a day to produce."

We are working on recalculations. The system for doing so intelligently is not in place, but you may see change over the next few days.

If I tell the classic recommendation system "No thanks!" for a particular book, will it carry over to the new system? And what about the reverse?

Random bitchiness: It seems that if I have any interest whatsoever in health or fitness, I *must* be interested in books about losing weight. Presumably the overlap with other readers is that they didn't skip the obligatory weight-loss sections in a book that was primarily about some relevant-to-me health topic.

Suggestion: could it be possible to let users choose which genres they want recommendations in? If it's too resource-intense to let us dial in any genre, I'd like to swap out a few...

Like others here, I'm finding that the new recommendations look like a very interesting bookshelf in a library/bookstore. The genre-specific ones are better, unsurprisingly, but even the All Genres has a lot of books I'd like to look at (none I want to quick-add, though, so I'll be going back to look at it quite a bit - not quite certain enough that I actually want them in my library, even in Wishlist). Some I already have but haven't yet added to LT (and I'll add them properly), many I'm waiting for (pre-ordered, or on hold at the library) (also to be added properly), and not a few I had no idea existed, go get them.

Another vote for series dismissal - I love everything Seanan McGuire writes but I can't handle what she does as Mira Grant. I can dismiss all the Mira Grants individually as they come up, but it would be nice to be able to say "not by this author name" (as opposed to "not by this author" which would include Seanan's stuff under her own name). Or just by series would cover it too - I'd have to dismiss two or three whole series, no biggie.

One small oddity/bug - the way this is handling horizontal covers is by chopping off the ends, so you get a slice of the middle of the cover. Which is OK for most covers, and better than making the space longer (and messing up the spacing), and probably better than making them tiny so they fit widthwise. So I don't really have any suggestion - actually, since the hover shows the full cover, it's already as fixed as it's getting. Oddity, yes, but not a bug.

This may have been asked before - I ran out of energy to read the whole thread. Would it be possible to multi-select genres? I'd like to look at Fantasy and Science Fiction together, for instance. It's a candy-coated pony and no big deal if it's complicated, but it would be nice. Or select all and then unselect some would be nice too.

>55 timspalding: The problem for me in the latter is that, I tend to overlap with Catholic people on my Catholic books and while I am Catholic, I have little interest in the Catholic devotional books.

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of devotional books either, Catholic or Protestant. Maybe you should program it to avoid all devotional stuff, just to be safe. :) I read across the theological spectrum (formerly Evangelical, now Episcopal; also the consulting librarian for a Byzantine Catholic monastery), and I think the recommendations reflect that quite well.

Now for a sparkly unicorn of a pony: Can you add a feature that gives us more free time to read all the new books you're recommending to us?

Some updates for the new Recommendations page:

We've add the option to dismiss series for recommendations. If a work belongs to multiple series, you will see a list with checkboxes where you can pick one or more of the series listed to dismiss.

We have also added a very basic page for viewing the things you have dismissed (works, authors, series): https://www.librarything.com/recommendations/MEMBERNAME/dismissed. X buttons allow removing them from your dismissed list.

>110 knerd.knitter: The url does not work for me (and it is not the MEMBERNAME replacement as I thought first).

And thanks :)

>110 knerd.knitter: Same here. Clicking the link takes me back to the home page.

>111 AnnieMod: >112 gilroy:

Oops, my mistake; should be working for you now

>113 knerd.knitter: Works now. Thanks! Now that will be fun. :) I still think we need a filter but I’d take that as a first step :)

>110 knerd.knitter: Usability request - it is not intuitive that you need to press the “Dismiss Series” button first to see the list of series list in multi-series books - the button looks as if it will dismiss all series. Can we change the text in that case to tell people how to get to the list of series. Add a “press the button to select which series to dismiss” or something along these lines? Or change the button to be clear it is a selection opening only at this point - Show Series or something like that?

>115 AnnieMod: That is a good point; I changed it to say Show Series with an eye icon when there are multiple series associated with the work.

>110 knerd.knitter: Okay, usability question on the dismissed page: does clicking the X put it back on the recommendations page, or remove it from recommendations entirely? Just curious.

>116 knerd.knitter: That’s a lot better. Thanks.

>117 gilroy: The top of the page says “Click the icon next to the author, series, or work to un-dismiss it from your recommendations.” So that removes it from the dismissed list and allows it to be recommended again.

Dismissing it removes it from recommendations already - that’s the whole point of dismissing. So not sure what “remove it from recommendations entirely” would mean - if it is on this page, it is already removed from the recommendations.

I just added a book that was not in the system and I added a bunch of recommendations for it so that other people can easily find it and read it. Currently I am the only user with the book in my library. The book was not even listed on Amazon... that's how rare the book is. It SHOULD be listed there... it's such a delightful book with delicious full color photos and illustrations on every page. Anyway, I have the ISBN # if anyone wants to find it. It's called Pearls in Paradise and the ISBN is 978-1-939456-30-4

I am wondering how these new recommendations are generated and if there is anything users can do to influence the system.

>42 jillmwo: I 100% agree. I also wish there were another option for "books that sound interesting but I probably won't read them." I could probably just create this list myself but it will show up in the 1,000s of books that I've read and also want to read. The wishlist is separate from "to read" because "to read" does not necessarily denote that I want that book in my actual physical library at home while, at least to me, wishlist implies that.

The series filter is great, my recommendations are now so much better. Thanks!

>110 knerd.knitter: Thank you for both of these.

> 110 Or maybe not. The cell-phone-style UI shows no actionable buttons at all, and when I select the browser window, then hover over the giant image of the book cover, the only choices are "Dismiss" and "Add". (I also get a pop-up description of the book I can't read, because it's cut off by the top of the sub-window, at least if I'm trying to see details of something in the top row of offerings.)

This style of interface has no way to distinguish between "if I click here it will give me a menu" and "if I click here it will do some action without an are-you-sure", let alone "but if I do some special click, something else might happen", so my natural inclination is NOT to click, and certainly not to discover the dismiss-whole-series feature.

You are going to need a very detailed help document to explain all the non-obvious features, if you insist on modernizing your interface (aka making as much as possible non-discoverable).

FWIW, the List interface is similarly bad - It has plenty of room for hovering over the button with an X to produce an actual menu, not just the word "Dismiss". You could even have several options each with their own button, and those buttons could even have room for real text, without hovering. (Advantage of NOT putting multiple books per line.)

It would be nice if your old-fashioned (aka list) UI wasn't merely a stripped down version of pseudo-cell-phone modernity, and actually had the features that lead old fogies like me to prefer such interfaces, beyond the basic one of being able to fit more information on a single screen.

>124 ArlieS: I am on a phone as well. Click dismiss and the second screen asks you what you want to dismiss - series or author.

While I'm complaining, it seems that if I select "all-time", and then select a different genre, the UI reselects "new books" requiring me to click to change back to "all-time".

I don't recall noticing this before, but perhaps when I played with the genre buttons before I wasn't really trying to use the system - i.e. I left it on its new book default.

On a related pony front; I’d like if “new books” v. “all time” stuck separately per genre.

(I’d typically want to see “all time” for fiction and “new books” for sciences.)

>118 AnnieMod: Oh, I forgot to read. LOL The irony is not lost on me. Thanks. :)

>126 ArlieS: While I'm complaining, it seems that if I select "all-time", and then select a different genre, the UI reselects "new books" requiring me to click to change back to "all-time".

That's intentional. It could go either way, but I feel that's the right choice.

On a related pony front; I’d like if “new books” v. “all time” stuck separately per genre.

If we did that, people would complain about it being erratic. It's too clever.

If you're minded, I'd love people's help here:

Help me with Recommendations?
https://www.librarything.com/topic/346882

Functionality question:
Are the Contains/Contained in links being factored into the recommendations engine? So if one owns the omnibus of a series, they aren't getting the individual books recommended?

>131 gilroy:

Yes, as long as it's been noted, the system should screen them out completely.

The Classics Recommendations do it partially--they remove books contained in books you have, but only hurt/downgrade recs for books that contain your books. While there may be cases you want to learn about an omnibus or whatever, I think it's rare, so now they're totally removed.

>132 timspalding:

Short story collections, perhaps especially multi-author ones, strike me as a non-rare case where you’d not want owning one of the stories already nixing the rec.

(Is this transitive, btw? Would my owning The Dunwich Horror and Others prevent me being recommended The Weird, since both contain The Dunwich Horror, or would the block only kick in if I’d catalogued the latter directly?)

>129 timspalding:

This is at least the 2nd time you shoot down one of my suggestions on the grounds of it being too clever. Are you trying to flatter me?

>133 AndreasJ: No, it doesn't go "up" and then "down." So your example would not be excluded.

>133 AndreasJ: Always.

>129 timspalding: Wow. Have people's expectations changed *that much* since I began using digital technology - or more to the point, began using window-and-mouse UIs?

Back when I first used such systems, carefully dodging dinosaurs to get access, selectors were almost always independent. If you had a choice of new/all-time and fiction/non-fiction, each would stick separately; no point in remembering which one you needed to select first in order to be able to get all 4 combinations.

Later, pages become somewhat dynamic. If you selected fiction, you might then be offered a choice of romance/sci fi/mystery, whereas if you selected non-fiction you might get a different set of choices. Quite often if you went from fiction + mystery to non-fiction and then back to fiction, mystery would not be automatically re-selected, though sometimes it was.

But I honestly hadn't noticed independent choices being routinely entangled this way. Oh well, I guess if it's new and modern it must be better, even though the only "advantage" I can see is that it makes the system slower to use. (Come to think of it, maybe that *is* the advantage as seen by those who are young and tech savvy; the company I retired from, once a leader in user interface, routinely makes window manager changes that slow down routine operations, and all my ex-colleagues tend to agree the new UIs are wonderful.)

>110 knerd.knitter:

I like being able to see the list of things that have been dismissed; it is helpful! But there doesn't seem to be a way to access this list from the Recommendations page itself, only by following the link in your post. Am I just blind and missing something obvious?

>87 lilithcat: thank you much about the hover thing, lilithcat

>135 ArlieS: Tim decided to change this functionality so the New Books/All-Time sticks between genres. Fixed.

>138 knerd.knitter: Woot! Thank you both!

So, um, when it says "several hours" just how many hours are we looking at? Two days?

>140 LShelby: Which post are you referring to? If you hit the reply button underneath that post it will automatically add a link to that post to your response

>141 jjwilson61:
When you go to the new recommendation page you get a message saying it might take several hours.

I've been waiting for my new recommendations for three days now. Is that normal?

>142 LShelby: They had severe DB issues over the weekend and some functionalities were completely turned off. It is possible that you were caught in that. I will ping someone in LT to see if they know any reason for that to be that slow.

>143 AnnieMod:
Thanks to you and to whoever got the ping... I have my recommendations now and they look quite interesting. I love that I can sort them by genre.

Fun coincidence: The first book on my History Genre list is one I already had on hold at the library. :D

>144 LShelby: I never got an answer so not sure it helped at all (maybe it just scared the gremlins and they decided to do their job before LT engineers need to kick them). Anyway - happy to know you are back to normal. :)

Sorry, I was getting confirmation about this yesterday before posting and then forgot to circle back! New Recommendations are tied to the crons that have been turned off since Friday, 2/3, so you wouldn't have seen them. Apologies for the trouble.

Crons are back up and running as of last night, I believe, so please check back and let us know if you're still seeing issues. (You may need to wait a day or two: I'm unsure if New Recs will need to work through a backlog or not.) Thanks for your patience.

I've been checking every few days for 3-4 weeks now and still can't see the new recommendations, are there still gremlins about? I hear good things and am curious to see what LT has for me :-)

You've excluded all of your Collections from Recommendations, which is why you're not seeing any.

If you go to "Your books" and open the Collections drop-down menu, then click to "Edit collections", you can choose which Collections you want us to consider when calculating recommendations for you. After you've added at least one Collection of books to your recommendations data, then go back to load the new recommendations page so we can calculate these for you!

>148 kristilabrie:

Thanks for figuring that out Kristi. I was stumped, and was going to rexamine the pipeline of processes, thinking I'd screwed something up.

That said, it should notify the user in some way when this happens. Working on it.

>149 timspalding: It does notify on the Classic Recommendations page, but not the New. That would be good.

>148 kristilabrie: Thanks that's done the trick, I didn't know those options were available under edit collection

>151 SouthernKiwi: Happy to help! I think they're left on by default, but given you've been a member since 2010 that's a long time to remember everything!

I see that in the new system, we now have notifications when we get new recommendations, and the ability to sort new recommendations by date. Thank you.

Is there any way to "select all" dismiss or clear them all at once? I've suddenly got 668 new recommendations and getting rid of them one by one is starting to annoy me.

>154 Taliesien: I managed to get rid of 700+ notifications. I think it can be made from the recommendation page.

>154 Taliesien:

Why would you want to do this? If you don't like your new recommendations, don't visit the page that has them.

>156 timspalding: well, I find annoying that today a yellow bell appeared in my home page stating that I have 700+ recommendations. I just removed the notice, as for the recommendations they may stay there. (I don't have time enough to read the books I buy, I don't need another bunch of books in my to-read list!)

>156 timspalding: Because the majority of them were books I'd never want to read and the few that were, I have already read. Since they showed up I went in and removed the check for 'include in recommendations' from each of my collections in hopes that will prevent future recs/notifications. It would just be nice to be able to dismiss all instead of one at a time, 668 times. Better yet a way to disable them entirely at the account level, like genres. I like having the ability to turn off features that I'm not interested in using and especially like having the UI remnants of disabled features disappear. That's good design. :)

>158 Taliesien: I believe the question was why would you want to dismiss them if you're not interested in any of them. Just leave them, you only have to dismiss the notification. Dismissing individual recs only makes sense if you want to let the system know a particular book is off mark. Otherwise, there's no reason to do it. Unlike genres, they do not appear on your book page or anywhere outside the recommendation module.

>158 Taliesien: You can turn off the notifications and just not go to the recommendations pages. That's what I did

alrighty then....I guess my reply to Tim's question of "why would you want to do this?" in response to my asking if there was a "dismiss all" or fast way to dismiss multiples (think Power Edit) was too tactful for some to read between the lines. Here's the blunt version.

In the old "Classic" recommendations I would get them in small (tiny compared to 668), manageable chunks. My workflow was to review them periodically and if something caught my eye I'd add it and "No thanks" the rest. I always cleared out the recs queue. That was my workflow. "No recommendations at present." was always the end goal of reviewing my recs. That's also how I managed them on GR back when I used it.

In the "New" recommendations I'm getting drowned in hundreds upon hundreds of recs and unlike "Classic" recs, the majority of "New" ones are terrible. I've never needed to mass remove large #'s of recs until now, so now I was looking for a better way to do that. Hence my question. And for the record, the "system" should get feedback that my recs suck and I should be able to provide that feedback without having to sit and repetitively do it 668 times. Or in some users cases 1000+ x.

In the end I wrote a macro to run in my browser and dismiss them all so that's sorted. I've also hopefully disabled any future recs by removing all my collections from being used to calculate them.

I find it very weird to have to explain why I would want a tool that could make it easier for me to process a large volume of "unwanted" recommendations in the same way they can be processed on an individual level. Sure, I can ignore the page, never visit it as has been suggested. But that just forces me to abandon the feature entirely, which wasn't my goal but is apparently my only choice in the current implementation. The irony of which you cannot grasp given my initial giddiness at the "Dismiss author" option in the new implementation. *shakes head*

My analogy to genres was just to contrast the convenience & elegance of being able to turn that on and off at the account level as compared to having to edit every collection to disable recs yet still having the UI components displayed even though I've now been basically forced to abandon the feature. Having gotten an answer to my query and come up with my own solution, I'm done with this topic. Carry on if you wish but I'm going to try the ignore button for the first time ever and see how that works. :D

The recommendation system doesn't care if you dismiss recommendations or not. If you want to improve them you'll have to figure out which of your books are generating the poor recommendations and tell the system not to use them. The easiest way to do that is to create a new collection where you add all the books that you want to be used for recommendations. Then turn off recommendations for all the other collections.

Once you start getting reasonable recommendations then just pay attention to the top ones . If there's a bad recommendation in that top set then dismiss it but there's no need to worry about the hundreds of recommendations below whatever you decide your threshold should be

Yeah, it's the "no need to worry" that doesn't work for Taliesien and probably won't for me either. I am in the process of creating a collection of only my read, high-rated books, so my recommendations should be interesting - but having a huge (hundreds, thousands) load of recommendations behind the top/new ones is going to be annoying (I'm trying to empty RMUC too...talk about trying to bail the sea). I'm glad you (and apparently most of LT) can handle that, but...I may end up shutting off the feature, too. I also agree with Taliesien's comment that I don't really _need_ any more books recommended...so shutting it off might be smart, anyway.

>163 jjmcgaffey: FWIW, RMUC becomes far less populated if you chose 'only my ISBN' in the settings.

I'm doing it in bits - my ISBN high quality, my ISBN lower quality...eventually (maybe) I'll have it at all books and all quality levels. Or not. It's a lot quicker to dismiss covers now, anyway - that helps.

My key to recommendations quality is to have one collection that I add everything I love or find extremely interesting to, and use only that for input to the recommendations engine.

Tangential to this, I know.

>161 Taliesien: I agree 100% with this.

I had gone through my original "new" recommendations and painstakingly pared them down to the books I might actually want to read. I'm excited about the recommendations! Lots of good things to look into.

And then I got like 250 new recommendations, and the previous ones I'd curated were not all "at the top" of the page, but randomly sprinkled throughout, so I had to carefully curate again.

Hence, what I would like is to get through the current recommendations, then when I'm ready, I'd like to be able to ask for, say, 100 new ones, that I can go through, rather than being inundated with hundreds at random intervals that I cannot control.

>162 jjwilson61: The recommendation system doesn't care if you dismiss recommendations or not.

It could care. It's a signal, and it could perhaps use that signal. I'm not sure, though. You might dismiss something because it's a bad recommendation, but you also might dismiss it because it's a good recommendation which you have already read—but aren't going to catalog. So I'm not sure.

>167 lemontwist: I had gone through my original "new" recommendations and painstakingly pared them down to the books I might actually want to read. I'm excited about the recommendations! Lots of good things to look into.

So, fundamentally, you're using your recommendations as a wish list. While I understand your motivation, I'm not going to adapt LT to this use. We already have a wish list feature. New recommendations are going to be added when we get new information about your books or about the books that exist and are similar in the world. That's how recommendations work everywhere else online.

This works amazingly well - a lot of books that I keep on my wishlists in various stores. The only -- and unavoidable -- shortcoming is recommendations of single volumes of multi-volume works that are sold and logged as a set or also appear in one-volume editions. But that's understandable and doesn't happen all that often. A very impressive engine! Thank you!

>168 timspalding: " It's a signal, and it could perhaps use that signal. I'm not sure, though. You might dismiss something because it's a bad recommendation, but you also might dismiss it because it's a good recommendation which you have already read—but aren't going to catalog. So I'm not sure."

Or because you are well aware of the author and they are a good recommendation but they also have 100 books which is a lot of noise. If you decide to use the dismissal to craft future batches, we may need two different types of dismissals - "hide" vs. "dismiss" maybe?

If you decide to use the dismissal to craft future batches, we may need two different types of dismissals - "hide" vs. "dismiss" maybe?

Yeah, although I dislike having users do a lot of work.

>168 timspalding: Question for you: does the system have a goal for number of recommendations? Suppose someone dismisses half their recommendations, will it promptly find the same number of new recommendations that it considers less good? And will they be in the same genres?

Related, does it present them in order, "best" ones first? (Assuming you don't ask it to group by date when recommended.)

I just got a small spate of definitely-don't-want-it, of a particular type. (They are redundant with my existing collection - in this case multiple Bible translations, some with added commentary, plus Bible study guides for beginners.) I dismissed them, but I'm wondering whether I can expect more of the same, rather than e.g. more interesting (to me) books about theology, or about religions other than Christianity - or if it does't know of any new ones, then no more religion books till some interesting to me get published.

Frankly, I ended up turning off notifications on the grounds I don't use recommendations here at all.

I periodically clear out my Amazon and Kobo recs; just because I read certain authors doesn't mean I want loads of other books in that genre. I could set don't use, but then I might run the risk of missing an upcoming title I want to pre-order; I find the Amazon new title notification for authors you follow is a bit hit and miss.

What might be useful is to have a 'follow' flag for authors or series in your catalogue rather than relying on blanket exclusions. Sometimes I read only a specific series or genre, other times I read anything by that author. An example would be Carole Nelson Douglas where I read the Midnight Louie series and her SFF. The more romance-adjacent I dislike, especially her historical romances.

>173 Maddz: I've found the old (classic) recommendations very useful. When I first started cataloguing my fiction, it recommended many books I already had, which seemed like a great sign to me. Once I got it all catalogued, it was pretty good at finding more similar works. My biggest complaint is that far too many were unavailable in local libraries, and I'm trying to avoid purchasing more books. It's been reasonably decent for non-fiction too.

What this means is probably that 1 in 10 seem worth pursuing, and of them, at least 1 in 2 turn out to be happy finds. This isn't quite as good as recommendations from people who know me, but better than anything else out there. (Amazon recs used to be about equally good, but these days they'd rather recommend something "sponsored" than anything I'd be likely to enjoy.)

The new system comes with two built-in disadvantages, given my usage pattern.

I decide what recommendations to check out *now* based on the books in my library the old system lists as leading to that recommendation. If they are all noir, and I'm in the mood for something cheery, I know to come back to that one later. If they are all also-ran books I rated as "finished it because I had nothing else to do", I know not to bother unless I'm desperate for reading matter. And if they are *all* books on the cusp of did-not-finish, that should maybe have been moved to a collection not to be used for recommendations, I know I can just dismiss this one. The new system doesn't work that way.

Its other problem is that it's very genre-oriented. Sometimes I'm in the mood for science fiction, any science fiction. More often I'm in the mood for space opera, *or* for exploration of non-human societies, *or* for social implications of technological change, *or* for fantasy-set-in-space. Not all at once, even though I read them all. Worse, it seems much more likely to pick books that are listed as in a genre I like, but which are in sub-genres I never read. E.g. I'm interested in thoughtful books about politics, economics, sociology, and history. I'm not interested in rants about how our political opponents are unspeakably evil.

Net result: I still mostly use classic, but don't totally ignore the new system.

>172 ArlieS: Question for you: does the system have a goal for number of recommendations? Suppose someone dismisses half their recommendations, will it promptly find the same number of new recommendations that it considers less good? And will they be in the same genres?

No. Dismissing recommendations doesn't change how many you get. Every time it adds new recommendations it may also take some off, if they are no longer statistically fit for you. It has no ideal number; rather, the number is whatever titles it thinks are significant to recommend.

Related, does it present them in order, "best" ones first? (Assuming you don't ask it to group by date when recommended.)

Yes in each genre. Within the combined recommendations it's making a deal between quality order and the prominence of the genre in your collection.

With the alert notification, I looked at the recommendations (1,000).

I have to admit I have not been keeping up with this thread because I generally don't have too much difficulty finding books of interest.

Since we have 9,000+ books in several categories (collections on LT) then it might be helpful when looking at a specific recommendation to know what is the basis for it (because you have X book in your catalog, etc.).

Likewise, with so many recommendations, I am probably not interested in ones from all categories. If it is collection-based as it appears to be, then being able to filter by collection would help. Say I'm looking at a mystery section of a bookstore and want to use the recommendations to look for books I don't have but might want to buy. Of course being able to sort by author would help for the stores (most) that are sorted that way.

I would also like to see the original publication date for the work being recommended. Then I could more easily see if it is a new publication or something old that I have missed.

With the old TiVo system, the thumbs up and down would guide the recommendations you want to see or don't want to see. Just because you watched the Rose Parade on New Year's Day or a specific news story does not mean that you want to have every parade or news program recommended. The same is true for books.

For this to be valuable, having 1,000 hit at once is overwhelming. Surely there's a way to drip these out. If not enough are shown, give us a "more" button to get the next batch.

I apologize if these sentiments are already covered above. I don't have time to read the thread as I normally would do before making a comment post.

James

>176 Keeline: "I would also like to see the original publication date for the work being recommended. Then I could more easily see if it is a new publication or something old that I have missed."

I get the impression that publishers do *NOT* make this easy to find. The copyright date (often a good proxy for publication date) doesn't seem to be part of the soft data associated with the book in the system(s) which feed LibraryThing. (You *can* almost always find this if you have the physical book in hand - and almost always in roughly the same place, regardless of publisher.)

And as for the actual date the work was first published - nope, if it's out of copyright you are on your own. If you are lucky, you can find out by reading any preface, introduction, blurb etc. and/or by consulting wikipedia.

>1 timspalding: Media. Editing the list. I have a bookbinding interest so like to note how a book is bound, The option to add to the list is great, but I cannot delete or change the additions I've made. Tim, can you add that to you 2Bdun list please.

I love the new module! I've been browsing, and the recommendations seem better, plus it's more fun to peruse them.

I don't have savvy criticisms to make, because I've already forgotten what the old version looked like. I just clicked on it, said 'still meh on it,' and went back to the new version.

So, I'll say that I wasn't using LT for recommendations because the classic version didn't hit the spot. The new module looks like it will. I've been using Storygraph specifically for sci-fi recommendations, but the new recs here look great! There are a number of titles similar to or the same as Storygraph's very good recommendations. There also are different, thoughtful titles on LT's list that have piqued my interest.

I also like the genre filter. One question: I just switched to include my 'Middle grade and YA' shelf in recommendations. I read a ton of middle grade. After the module's had time to repopulate, will there be a middle grade genre button? Right now, I only have teen. If not, I'd like to request that a middle grade genre be added at some point in time.

Thank you!

>179 libraryperilous: I don't see Middle Grade in mine but I see Children's Books, Kids, Tween, Teen and YA...

The genres here match the ones here: https://www.librarything.com/settings/genres

You may want to make the Genre column visible in one of your viewing styles in your catalog and check where the books from that collections are landing - that will tell you where the recommendations for this kind of books will show up.

>180 AnnieMod: Thanks! Once the recommendations repopulated, children's, kids, and tween were added. They all populated books that could be classed middle grade. I didn't really dig in to the differences, but I imagine the kids and children's genres have what I'd label lower middle grade or chapter books.

Thanks for the link to the genres in settings. I've made some changes there as well.

Sorry if this has already been dealt with, but I find it annoying rather than helpful to have a little yellow bell appear in the top right hand corner telling me I have "more than 1,000 new recommendations". Intuitively I would expect the appearance of a yellow bell to tell me that there is an interesting or important notification awaiting me. Is there a way I can disable it?

If you click the arrow next to Notifications it takes you to a page with a Notifications Settings link.

>183 Aquila:

Thank you! Done!

Request: I'd like to know how many recommendations for each genre I got in my latest batch of 579 new recommendations.

In particular, I was trying to write a post about what appeared to be severe imbalance by genre and sub-genre, and found I'd have to manually count rows.

Please put totals somewhere on the new recommendation page. (Classic already has this, for ways those recommendations can be broken down - though that doesn't include genre.)

This isn't a bug report. It's more like a "this is weird" report, with a side order of "system doesn't seem to fit this use case"....

On March 11, I catalogued 9 more books from my shelves, all from the same genre (religion & spirituality). On Mar 14 I got 579 new recommendations (new system). (For contrast, the classic system gave me 11 on March 13, and one on March 14.)

I feel as if the new recommendations very much over-weight religion & spirituality, and farthermore overweight the particular area within r&s that all 9 books belonged to (wicca), overflowing into a couple of related areas (neo-paganism, magic).

I'm not going to count the number of books of each type in the 579. But the results I got from the classic system seemed a lot more reasonable - of the 12 new recommendations, 5 were R&S, 3 of them were Wicca, and 2 or 3 of those are already on my shelves, and may be catalogued today.

579 books, with 50-100 of them being R&S (guessing based on the top few screens) seems overwhelming. Twelve leaves me curious what will be recommended next. And the matching with books I already have is impressive. The classic system wins hands down here, for me.

Part of the problem is obviously that I'm cataloguing books I acquired decades ago, in a subfield I don't read all that often today - but the new system favors recently published books. (And I can't see a way to select all-time rather than new 'new books', in the new system, when also selecting for books recently recommended.) If these are all books "published" in the past year or 2, the only ones I'll recognize, let alone own, will be ones coincidentally reprinted in that time period.

If I look at all recommendations (not just new ones), I don't feel completely overwhelmed with wicca at the expense of the rest of R&S, or with R&S at the expense of every other genre.

--
Again, not a bug report as much as wondering what kind of usage pattern this works well for.

>186 ArlieS: If the books you've added recently are all in one genre then it makes sense that most of your new recommendations will be from that genre. The solution is to look at all your recommendations instead of just the new ones and the strongest of the new ones will rise to the top

>187 jjwilson61: Are the new ones actually new? 579 seems like an awful lot, particularly if they are all either published since my last batch of new recommendations (7 days before this set) or generated in response to me adding 13 books since the previous batch.

They're probably works that moved from just below the threshold to be recommended to just above so they're likely to be poor recommendations anyway

>55 timspalding: "To be honest, ratings are not taken into account."

Possession is Ten-Tenths of the Algorithm.

Its been mentioned before, but the ability to filter by media (such as available in audiobook) would be very useful.

Also helpful would be the ability to filter by genre even if you don't have enough of a cluster for dedicated recommendations since books have multiple genres and there may be some of a given genre in your combined list (and because recommendations are particularly helpful when people are trying to start out in a new genre)

>191 Shinanoki:

I hear you. I don't think we'll be doing it, however. The point about new books is that they are new, and new books don't always have all the data, and, even if they do, we don't necessarily have it yet. Even if we have it, we might have data for media that hasn't come out yet—for example, many books come out in paper before they come out in audio.

In the new work page, however, we will be listing what we know about media.

>192 timspalding:
Recommendations aren't only useful for new (in the sense of publishing) books though, frankly they're least useful for them because new releases is something you can passively keep an eye on unlike old but new (to the reader) things.

Its absolutely true that the lack of data means that the recommendations would be coming out of a limited subset, but if you're looking to fill the spot of your next audiobook to listen to (and not 'a book I'd like to read in general' with a secondary preference for media) that doesn't really matter because recommendations out of a limited subset are still an actionable list which is much more useful than going through recommendations one by one to see what's actually relevant (and of course you'd still have access to the non-media filtered list if you want to see if any of the top ten or whatever are missing the data)

The issue of data for media that hasn't come out yet though does seem problematic even if not decisive.

I added 130 books around five days ago but still haven't received any recommendations. Is that normal? Will rating more books fix the problem?

>194 Paul_Bernal:
Your books are in collections with the "Include in recommendations" box checked?

I would be interested to run the recommendations algorithm on books in my catalog, particularly the wishlist collection. I suspect I am not the only person with a wishlist so large I don't know what's in it anymore. The recommendations algorithm could surface books I picked out once upon a time but have forgotten.

>196 eromsted: I've got an RSI for that (kinda) :-)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348655

>193 Shinanoki: This! In my case, I don't read ebooks, with the extremely rare exception of while taking long airplane trips.

Some quantity of bookstore, library, etc. web sites make it impossible for me to say "don't ever give me ebook-only responses". At best, after getting 11 matches, I can click the button on the side to find they actually only offer 2 physical books. Or zero. At worst, I have to examine each offering individually to find out that the process of attempting to read it will be more trouble than it's worth to me, and if I were to purchase it it might well disappear from my collection at some future date.

Bujold is a big offender here - a lot of her recent novellas have been ebook-only. (Also quite a price for so few words/pages.) But several local libraries are worse, in terms of what they actually purchase, even when physical books are available.

Also, with regard to books announced and available some time next year - I don't want them in my recommendations. Or at least, I don't want them in my recommendations *until they are available*. I'd like a way to not see recommendations for books currently only available for pre-order. (And ditto for books only currently available in formats I don't use, with the one I want to be released some time next year.)

>194 Paul_Bernal: They get generated in batches - so in addition to what >195 Shinanoki: asked, you may also need to be patient. How often yours get generated depends on how active you are on the site (unclear what will trigger more recommendations) so for some people it may be every few weeks/months.

I'm enjoying the batches. I don't know if I'll every find anything I want to read but the bite sized chunks of titles are entertaining to go through.

Months later, I'm still loving the new recommendations system. It's working great for me.

I've been going through my recommendations, dismissing the ones I'm not interested in, and I'm running into a rather annoying behaviour (Mac/Ventura/Safari). When the window pops up to dismiss, it often resizes itself (because the 'dismiss series' or another function appears/disappears) JUST as I'm trying to click 'dismiss recommendation' with the result that the buttons shift at the last second, and I keep inadvertently clicking on 'wrong genre'. This has happened often enough to spur me here to report, because someone on LT's side of things is going to see all these 'wrong genre' reports for books that are definitely in the right genre and think I'm an idiot.

Is there anyway to preload the necessary modules before the window pops up, or is there a way I can undo a wrong genre click so LT doesn't have to deal with it? (I've tried slowing down my reactions, but the window's re-sizing speed isn't constant, so even when I go slower, the buttons still shift just as I'm clicking.)

>202 murderbydeath: I have the same issue! It's very frustrating. The UI in general is clunky for dismissing recommendations.

Back in the old days, instead of adding and removing buttons and so resizing the window, the unwanted-this-time buttons would simply be deactivated, with a visually obvious indication of their state (they'd generally be greyed out).

This was less confusing than the modern form, and didn't lead to queries like "what 'dismiss series' button? When I tried this out I didn't see one."

Given that the LibraryThing interface is pleasantly retro, perhaps it should handle this the old way. (If that's even possible with modern web programming frameworks.... it might not be.)

>202 murderbydeath:

I completely agree. The jittery resizing here and elsewhere on LT2 is frustrating. conceptDawg is working on it.

>205 timspalding: Thank you! It just happened again, so I'm looking forward to seeing a solution; in the meantime, please pass on my apologies to whomever has to go through the wrong genre flags.

Finally catching up on this and it looks interesting! In general I like the New Recommendations option - it's much more likely to get the things I've been meaning to add to my to-read lists than the old recommendations were - but I've having the same problem mentioned way up thread that there are a *lot* of books about recent US politics - about 1/4 of my first 100 recs were recent US politics! I don't own a single book about US politics more recent than 2016 - on purpose!

I assume I'm getting a lot of them because I do own a lot of books about politics in general, and most recently-published books about US politics are, understandably, about recent US politics, and I don't own any of them even when they're on topics I might have found interesting if it wasn't via recent US politics, so the new algorithm is finding them all.

I think this is the same root problem as a lot of other people above - i.e., if I have a lot of books about Catholicism, but I specifically avoid Catholic devotionals, the system is going to say, look, here are all the books from people who like Catholic stuff that you don't have and flood you out. If I have a lot of books about music but I hate opera, the system is going to say here's all the books from people who like music that you don't have.

This was a little bit of a problem on the old system, but since it paid more attention to books than to users, it was actually capable of noticing things like "this person likes politics but doesn't want to have to look at Donald Trump's face" or "This person likes books about music but never opera" where the new one doesn't seem to. I don't know if there's a good way to fix that? But a way to have it notice when there's a group of related books that I don't own any of, even if the more general recommendations think I should, would vastly improve it for me. (Alternatively, a way for me to tell it "Stop showing me stuff about the modern American far right, ever, please" would also fix it. I was hoping I might be able to filter out a tag, but it doesn't look like that's an option? Also nothing even slightly related to recent US politics is given as an option for tags, presumably because everything except New doesn't have a noticeable number of them.)

While I'm giving feedback, I'd also like to mention that while I really like the pop-up with the description of the book that you get when you mouse over the covers, it pains me to say that most of them are useless as a convenience, because most of the book synopsis' are drowning beneath marketing and author pull-quotes. Instead of being able to mouse over and actually read a description of the book, I have to open the book page in order to wade through all the marketing crap to get to the actual synopsis.

Can we either: 1. have a scroll bar on the pop-up so we can scroll past that stuff, or 2. a way to edit the synopsis' so that it is devoid of all the excess marketing copy?

(Aside: so far, I've read 3 recommendations and enjoyed all 3 of them.)

>208 murderbydeath: No way to edit the synopsis, those come from Bowker or something similar, but when there are multiple descriptions, they can be up and downvoted so that short and to the point ones are the default. In general, only one or two members doing this is enough to get a decent one on top.

>208 murderbydeath: I agree it would be SO NICE to be able to eliminate that garbage from the descriptions.

I will go vote on the descriptions, and I always downvote the stuff with the crap at the beginning, but sometimes there are no good alternatives.

After checking the batches as they show up I'm curious as to how the recommendations are hitting. I'm getting a lot of speculative fiction though my library also has a lot of non fiction, and that doesn't seem to show up much.

Also, I'm not sure how the "wishlist" collection interacts with the rest of my account so I've been hesitant to use that add button. I don't want books I merely am interested in to have any effect on the fun metrics on my account. I have a list that I use for books I want to wishlist, and would prefer an option to add a book to one of those, personally.

>211 bokai: You can exclude any collection from being considered for recommendations. Go to the collections editor (Edit from the list of collections) and there is a checkbox for that under the collection name. Uncheck it for Wishlist and any other collection you want and you are all set.

Speaking of non-fiction, has anyone else found it to require a lot more than 10 to get sufficient clustering to trigger non-fiction genres?

>212 AnnieMod:

It's not just recommendations I want excluded. In fact recommendations are the only thing I wouldn't necessarily need excluded. It's how many books I actually have, how many in what language, in what years are they printed, how many I added over which period of time, vous et nul autre, etc. that I would not want a "wishlist" to have any effect on.

It seems like "my library" was not included in recommendations by default so maybe that's where the weighting was going odd.

>214 bokai:
The charts & graphs pages have a filter at the top relating to collections. So we can set it to display only the 'Your Library' collection, and (so long as our wishlisted items are added only into the 'Wishlist' collection), their info won't be included in the displayed stats. Then if for any reason we do want to view stats for the combined collections, knock the filter off and that's possible too.

>212 AnnieMod: Actually, I was coming here to comment that the recommendation setting on collections appears to not be working.

I only have one collection approved for recommendations, not changed it in months. But I'm getting new recommendations when I add new books to other collections.

>216 gilroy: The new ones? You will be getting new ones even if you do not add books at all - they are not tied to the specific books as the old ones were(where each recommendation had a list of books causing it) - they are based on similar libraries, all the books you have in collections which are marked for recommendations and what’s not. So getting new recommendations does not mean that it ignores the setting necessarily.

>216 gilroy: Exactly. I'm not sure why everyone is talking about the Recommendation setting in connexion with the New Recommendations system. As far as I know, the new system doesn't use it.

>218 anglemark:
>I'm not sure why everyone is talking about the Recommendation setting in connexion with the New Recommendations system. As far as I know, the new system doesn't use it.

I thought Tim confirmed it still obeys the checkmarks, in >94 timspalding:.

(Edit): further with >148 kristilabrie: saying as advice:
>You've excluded all of your Collections from Recommendations, which is why you're not seeing any.

So it must be obeying, if deselecting every collection ends up with it offering no recommendations. Haven't tried this out myself to see, but if you were skeptical it could be a way to prove/confirm it.

I will have to experiment.

>216 gilroy: Back in Feb I removed all collections from being used for recommendations and it worked for a while. I had none. Now though, all collections are still disabled for recs and I have recommendations again. If it's going to continue to generate recs even though I don't want them, I really need that "dismiss all" button. Or like genres, maybe we could get an on/off toggle? Please?

If you don't like seeing recommendations at all, you can turn off the notification for new recommendations (click on the bell up top and then click on the gear button) and then don't click on the "Recommendations" tab and you'll never know they're there. No need to dismiss anything or uncheck the box for every single collection.

>221 Taliesien: Where are you seeing recommendations again?

NB: I'm curious if this is due to the "Private (feature is in development)" Collection issue, if you are seeing new recs somewhere...

>221 Taliesien:
Its still the case that way you're engaging with the system is fighting its underlying logic. They're supposed to... be recommendations. You check to see what the system recommends for you and it recommends whatever it thinks you might want to read. Obviously when its capable of producing more recommendations it adds them. If it thinks they're higher value recommendations then it puts them at a higher rank than some chronologically older things.

Sure, there's an option to dismiss because it doesn't hurt to let someone delete an egregiously wrong suggestion and who knows maybe it has potential as a data source but its not a fundamental tool for interacting with it. You don't need the recommendations page to be blank in the first place. If you don't want to be poked about new recommendations you can disable notifications. If you don't care about the tail end of the results you can just ignore them. If you only care about what's come up since you last checked it you can check the newest page. If you don't want to forget about a book you can move it into wishlist.

>223 kristilabrie: I had new recs in the "new" recommendations area as well as the classic. This changed sometime in the past month. After I turned off recs for all collections back in Feb, I stopped getting recs in both the new and the old "classic" system. This went on for several weeks, and I think the last time I checked to make sure I still had the lovely "There are no recommendations here! Try changing your settings." was around mid-March. I don't think it's related to the Private collection bug because after disabling all collections from recs in Feb it was working as expected.

>225 Taliesien: I logged in as you and didn't see any recs on any pages except for https://www.librarything.com/profile_raterecommendations.php, https://www.librarything.com/profile/Taliesien/recommendations/memberbooks, and https://www.librarything.com/profile/Taliesien/recommendations/readalikes, so I need to dig into this further.

You're currently seeing recs as of now? Or were you saying that you were seeing recs but are not any longer? If the former, can you give me a screenshot, or let me know what browser and OS (operating system) you're using (e.g. Google Chrome, version 90 and Windows 7, etc.)? (I can't imagine this would change when we show recs but I'm stumped as to why I'm not seeing any.)

>226 kristilabrie: I deleted (dismissed) them all during lunch when I replied to you. There were 33 "Classic" recs and a couple hundred "new" recs. The last time I checked to make sure I wasn't getting any after unchecking all my collections in was mid-March and both the "Classic" and "new" were still both empty. I only looked again this morning after seeing >216 gilroy: comment that recs weren't honoring which collections were checked for them or not. I was checking every week from mid-Feb thru mid-Mar and they were always empty so I crossed it off as "fixed" and stopped checking.

Just to be clear, my understanding and expectation is that if I have zero collections ticked for "Include in recommendations" I won't get any. That's how it was working once I did that, until recently apparently.

I just got another 213 recommendations in the new system. It felt like the 'bot was dredging the bottom of the barrel. I'd really love to know why these books were recommended; there may well be some books in my library I need to move to a collection not to be used for recommendations. More likely though, the software is tuned to favor quantity over quality - there was, IIRC, one book in the set that seemed interesting enough for me to click on it to take a look, other than those where my question was "what possessed the 'bot to recommend that?".

>228 ArlieS: Yeah - I stopped even looking at the new lists after the first few batches - the first few passes were very good but since then it is a big number of weird things.

>217 AnnieMod: Right. And the recommendation boxes on collections should mean my library would consist of 13 books. Which means I should not be seeing recommendations for Business, Romance, Suspense & Thriller, or even potentially YA because I have none of those in the single checked collection. Yet I still do. The NEW recommendations (some of which are old out of print unfindable books) limit to just what I have in the collection, but the other page isn't.

Even if you don't have any business books in your collection with recommendations turned on the other libraries you connect to via the books in that collection may have business books. And if they have enough of those books in common then you will get recommendations for those business books. But since the books are separated by genre it's easy to just look at the genres you care about and ignore the ones you don't

>230 gilroy: The new recommendations are not based on a single book as the old ones were but based on similarities with other members' libraries. So yes, you will be seeing recommendations in genres you have no books in at all - if a lot of members who have your 13 books have books in these genres.

That's where the ability not to look at that genre or switch off some genres altogether comes into play.

>231 jjwilson61: beat me to it :)

>232 AnnieMod: If only genres were a lot more fine grained.... there aren't many genres I don't read, but plenty of sub-genres.

I accomplish this with the old recommendation system - which needs it less - by using the select-by-other-people's-tags feature.

I will note that an unintuitive behaviour is that librarything won't remove books from its recommendations if you remove books from a use for recommendations collection.

Thus the all-time list is "anything we've ever recommended you" and not "anything we'd recommend to you now"

>234 Shinanoki: Does this apply to both the old and the new systems?

>232 AnnieMod: The problem's with the altogether part, though, if I turn off a genre because I don't want it used for reccomendations it is turned off everywhere so I can't e.g. filter my own collection by that genre. Single genre pages are really a workable solution when there are 17 genres I do want to see but only 2 or 3 I don't.

>236 tallpaul: So open an RSI to request the settings to be disconnected so they can be set differently in different places…

>235 ArlieS:
Only the new system, the old system would fully regenerate recommendations based on whatever books are in recommendation collections

>238 Shinanoki: One more reason for me to hope that the old system never gets turned off.

While some clearly prefer the new system, and I'm glad they have it available, the new one just doesn't work as well for my reading and book recording patterns.

Does the new system ever remove recommendations once you have added the book to your collection?

Exhibit A: This is my first new book recommendation in the new system: https://www.librarything.com/work/27670670

Exhibit B: This book is in my collection: https://www.librarything.com/work/27670670/edit/238733525

I added this book to my library on 2023-04-13

I've had two batches of new recommendations added since that date, so I'd expect any clean up process to also have run - assuming it doesn't happen instantly when you add the book to your collection, as it does with the old recommendation system.

When I finally got around to checking, I expected to find two different LibraryThing works for the same actual work, combine them properly, and stop seeing this book recommended. So I was quite surprised to find that both references were to work 27670670

I'd report this in the bugs forum, but there's at least some chance that this is either works-as-designed or feature-not-yet-implemented, so I'm checking here first.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this.

It's been about 48 hours since I first got the "Unfortunately, we have not yet calculated your recommendations." message. I'm still getting the message. Is this normal? Can it sometimes take several days or weeks?

>241 xevooy: Hmm, verified that I'm seeing this on your account's Recommendations page. I'll ask timspalding about it.

I am back to LibraryThing after a couple years spent with GoodReads. I imported a couple hundred books and spent a few days organizing. During all of this, my recommendations appeared. Great! However I had not finished setting up the collections and selecting which collections should be included for recommendations. I've looked at the recommendations, and they look interesting but when I click on the "Would you like this?" link in the recommendation, it always says that I will probably not like it. I have been waiting a couple days hoping that the recommendations would regenerate based on my new collection organization, I even added a few more books, but no new recommendations. Not the end of the world, there are many other sources of recommendations on the site! However, I'm curious - when will the recommendations regenerate?

Thanks!

>243 lbspen: Welcome back!

With the new system, I get new recommendations approximately once a week, but apparently this varies depending on how active your account is, which ought to mean you'll see changes sooner than I do.

With the old system - which remains still available - a handful of new recommendations tend to appear the day after I add more books. Back when I was adding more than a few books per day, larger numbers of new recommendations would appear.

I'm unclear when cleanup happens, except that with the old system, adding a book causes it to be immediately removed from your list of recommendations.

Also, I suspect that "Would you like this?" is tied to the old system, perhaps to the exclusion of the new one.

>243 lbspen: The new system doesn't look at collections or what you want to limit it to. It takes whole libraries into account. See the running argument that starts at about >216 gilroy: and continues through at least >230 gilroy:

>245 gilroy: Still ignoring what the guy that wrote the code said? See >94 timspalding: by Tim: "No, it only uses the books that you have marked as for recommendations."

>245 gilroy: per >219 Nevov:, in >94 timspalding: and >148 kristilabrie: staff members said it paid attention to the "use for recommendations" setting.

But also >234 Shinanoki: - moving a book out of a use-for-recommendations collection is claimed not to remove recommendations previously made because of it. OTOH, there's this bug report https://www.librarything.com/topic/350801 - it's looking there like the new system is *very* slow about garbage-collecting recommendations that are no longer relevant, taking something on the order of a whole month, but does eventually do it.

>245 gilroy: Not still ignoring. Just repeating what you keep saying. It pulls from the entire library. Which means it doesn't matter what you have checked.

>248 gilroy: Nope. It only uses the collections marked for recommendations. As Tim said in >94 timspalding:.

It certainly does not pull from your entire library for recommendations. This is incredibly clear since my marked for recommendations list is significantly curated such that it does not even generate a genre list for my most common genre for my library in general.

It is also the case that it does not even generate them in the first place unless your marked for recommendations list constitutes at least 100 entries (incidentally this is documented in this thread, but the recommendations page itself will never tell you anything other than "Unfortunately, we have not yet calculated your recommendations" if that's why it isn't producing anything)

I should also note that "will I like it" always ran on spooky magic and while neat was never _that_ sensible

Thanks all for the info. Quite a debate about what's used as a basis for recommendations! I haven't yet gotten a second round so it'll be very interesting to see if I can see similarities with my selected collections or not. For now, I'm reading the top recommendation I got from the first round and it's pretty good despite the "probably won't like it" prediction!

The "probably won't like it" is actually based on, do other people whose libraries are similar to yours (have a lot of the same books you do) have this book? I don't believe it pays attention to ratings, even. So it's interesting but not very good at predicting, really. Especially for newer books.

It does admit its fallibility.

I got a recommendation today for a book that I already have in a collection that the Recommendation engine should be looking at.

Is there a way to flag it as a duplicate? Is the recommendation for one ISBN, and I have a different one?

Just curious.

>254 mahsdad: Can you share what the title is?

Likely needs combining.