Posted on August 9, 2012
Recently, since I’ve been in Atlanta, GA for my internship for a many weeks now, I’ve started to feel a little homesick. Normally, I like to remedy times when I feel down with books that include characters who understand what I’m going through. This is pretty easy if I just go down to a book store and roam around long enough. Eventually I stumble onto something that sparks my interest.
However, being that I have no vehicle in Atlanta, and bookstores not being readily available, I’ve been trying to look up books online by subject and content. This is apparently much easier said than done. Search engines for Amazon and Barnes and Nobel are set to search by authors and titles, not by content. Sometimes they go so far as to look at the description inside the book, but so far my searches have returned little to no useful information. With the thousands upon thousands of books in the world written in the English language, I find it hard to believe that no one has told a story about going away on an internship or business trip for a long period of time and feeling homesick. So I’m left to believe that it’s a problem with the way the search works.
So what do you do when technology isn’t quite helping you find what you need? What happens when search engines aren’t helping you? Well, you search for a new search engine.
First on the list of things I found was a site called Which Book (www.WhichBook.net) where you slide some bars and it attempts to find you a book in line with those topics.
While it has an attractive design and it’s easy to use, I’m looking for something a little more directed.
The next website is called What Should I Read Next (www.whatshouldireadnext.com). Which I found less cluttered than Book Lamp (also, book lamp couldn’t find books I liked), but it only asks what book you like and suggests similar books. That’s helpful, but I’ve not read a book like the one that I want right now.
There’s not a whole lot else out there that I could find. If you know of a good book search engine that you like, feel free to comment on this entry and let me know. I’ll check it out and post it here later.