Apple acquires ‘Pandora for books’

Apple has acquired book analytics and recommendation company BookLamp, described as a ‘Pandora for books’, reports Techcrunch. The company, which was purchased for between US$10 and US$15 million, is best known for its Book Genome Project, a platform that lets users find suggestions for books to read based on natural language analysis of other titles—their structure and elements such as the writing style, the pacing of the book, dialogue and genre. The information is then compared to other books to identify similar books and offer readers book recommendations. In April, BookLamp announced that it was shutting down the project. According to Techcrunch, Apple’s acquisition of BookLamp ‘could improve the recommendations, search, and categorization of titles in iBooks’. As previously reported by Books+Publishing, Amazon bought book-recommendation website Goodreads in April 2013. Apple confirmed the acquisition of BooklLamp to Techcrunch and said, ‘Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.’