It’s hard to pick which book to read next. Especially if you have many. I’ve spent far too much time in front of my bookcases, pondering what’s next. Still, standing there I can pull a book and read the jacket. Put it back, read another. On and on until something tickles my fancy.
This is impossible with e-books on a Kindle. I just have a massive list of way too many books sitting there with no real way to discover the next binge. I’d either pick at random and live with my choices, or google titles for blurbs on another device. Title after title after title after title… wait—what was that first one again? It’s no way to live.
Then it hit me. Finally a good use for AI. Can’t I just feed it my entire list of e-books on my Kindle and have it produce a new e-book. One that’s just a list of all my digital books, but ordered by category. Click a genre and the e-reader will move me to the section I want. Let’s say thriller. This will just show me all the thriller book titles I have on my e-reader in alphabetical order, but add a blurb for every book there.
It’s pretty simple, turns out. I just did an ls in my books directory and fed that to an AI. I then posed: “Please sort these books by genre and add a blurb to each, consisting of five lines maximum. Then provide it to me in an epub format”.
This gave me an e-book index of all my books on the reader with blurbs on what they were about. This makes discovery so much easier and on-device, instead of relying on me to google stuff. I refer to it after each book I read to pick the next. My wife saw me do this and made me make her one too. It’s now how she browses her books as well.
Some caveats though. With well known books, the blurb will be fantastic. Relatively unknown books and AI will struggle. There’s a book I love, which is not on the New York Times Best Seller list. There’s a book with the same title, by a completely different author and in my reading index, AI blurbed the well known author’s book, not the unknown one. My point is know the limitations. AI isn’t flawless, it’s deeply flawed. When you’re three pages in and you think: “This story does not match the blurb”, AI messed up. Back to Google.
Still, for discovery and picking what to read next, this is the simplest and easiest way to go about it on an e-reader at this time, I think. It’s far from perfect, but closest to standing in front of that bookshelf—eyeing and reading covers.
