Table of contents Introduction...............................................................................................................................4 Motivation and Background...........................................................................................5 Problem formulation......................................................................................................6 Project Limitations.........................................................................................................7 Project Structure............................................................................................................7 Methodology..............................................................................................................................9 Secondary Research.......................................................................................................9 Primary Research...........................................................................................................9 Target group.................................................................................................................10 Book and genres specifications....................................................................................10 Book quotes specifications...........................................................................................11 Recruitment process....................................................................................................11 Testing ..........................................................................................................................12 Background questions...........................................................................18 Briefing and Execution..........................................................................19 Debriefing.............................................................................................19 Summary......................................................................................................................20 Literature/State of the art.......................................................................................................21 Related examples.........................................................................................................21 Amazon.................................................................................................21 Booklamp..............................................................................................24 Goodreads.............................................................................................25 Martinus................................................................................................27 Algorithmic recommendation methods.......................................................................29 Collaborative filtering...........................................................................30 Content-based filtering.........................................................................30 Knowledge based approach..................................................................31 Hybrid recommender systems..............................................................31 Critique of algorithmic recommendations...................................................................31 Analysis of user tests................................................................................................................33 Stage 1: Quick and dirty testing...................................................................................33 Stage 2: First HTML based prototype...........................................................................33 Stage 2: Interview findings...................................................................36 Stage 2: User requirements/feature wishes.........................................37 Stage 3: Comprehensive HTML based prototype.........................................................38 Stage 3: Interview findings....................................................................40 Stage 3: User requirements/feature wishes.........................................42 Stage 4: Live Web service with Google Analytics.........................................................48 Stage 4: User requirements/feature wishes.........................................56 Summary of the user requirements/ feature wishes...................................................57 Prototype.................................................................................................................................62 Overall description.......................................................................................................62 Technologies................................................................................................................68 Discussion................................................................................................................................70 Conclusion................................................................................................................................73 Future work..............................................................................................................................75 Business potential........................................................................................................77 References...............................................................................................................................78 Appendix..................................................................................................................................80 Free transcriptions of answers from Stage 1: First HTML-based prototype................80 Transcriptions of the interviews - Stage 2: Comprehensive HTML-based prototype...87 Source code embedded from Google Analytics...........................................................92 Screen dumps with other reports from Google Analytics............................................93 Transcriptions of comments and suggestions from Stage 4........................................95 List of genres................................................................................................................97 Introduction Importance of recommendation of goods has always been part of the human society and mankind. People recommend themselves different things on a daily bases, starting from the favourite food up to the new car or house. Everyone on the planet Earth, no matter where he is coming from, makes plenty of decisions based on what he heard from the others or what was recommended to him. With the upcoming of the new technologies like the Internet, new possibilities for recommendation appeared. Many of us started to share their opinions about the products we think are the best and definitely should be bought. We started to recommend globally and anyone can read our preferences and advices. However those processes can be a bit disarranged and not every user is interested in reading plenty of comments. Fast forward after the digital revolution, time has become one of the scarcest values therefore there is a need for more automation of these processes. The introduction of first recommender systems in 1992 [1] brought revolution to the area of recommendations. Not so long time after in 1995 [2], Amazon, first book recommendation portal appeared and its “rules of recommendation” became so strong, that nothing bigger emerged in this field until now. Books are one of the most interesting commodities to handle and they accompany mankind for very long time and for most the time of our existence, it has been the most important source of knowledge and information. Even in the epoch of the internet and instant access to the information they are still irreplaceable. On the other side, books are not only valuable source of information and knowledge. They are also reservoir of joy, sadness, love and other emotions. From the first poem called Epic of Gilgamesh [3] up today, when thousand of stories are published yearly, they are our friends, when we want to escape from the reality and experience the story of someone or something else. Today, there are plenty of ways, how to get a new book. One of the most specific ways is to get a recommendation from the online book recommender system. From my point of view, most interesting part of this process is that algorithm, regardless of the technical specification (Collaborative or Content-base filtering and many others), can tell you which book you should read or which can fits the most to your preferences. The largest players on the market even developed their own algorithms to make recommendations more precise, faster and broader. But honestly we have to ask the questions: “Are those algorithms working for us, book readers, or for them, who are behind the scene of recommendation and earn some share, if you buy their books? Are they so well developed, that they can always guess, what your preference is in such a complicated field, like books definitely are? ”. The answer is definitely not clear and there are plenty of arguments on both sides of the river. While these big questions each deserve a discussion that is beyond the scope of this theses, they form however the background and inspiration for the present project. By a practical 4 design experiment, an alternative solution for book recommendation is sought for. I will try to design book recommendation portal, which will be based on

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