Yostivanich

The tweet that spawned this post

Net­flix in case you haven’t heard of it is sys­tem whereby you give them money and they send you movies by mail that you can keep for as long as you want. No late fees, no extra charges on your account. Mail back the movie in their pre-paid enve­lope and a new movie is on your doorstep, in a few days.

What makes Net­flix stand out against any other sys­tem with the same fea­ture set is their super intel­li­gent pre­dic­tion sys­tem. After you view a movie, they ask you to rank it on a scale of 1–5 stars, and over time they make guesses what you would like to watch.

As a side note, Net­flix just fin­ished a cam­paign gath­er­ing inde­pen­dent teams to com­pete for a $1 mil­lion to beat their inter­nal algo­rithm by 10% or bet­ter. While it doesn’t sound that hard, it took a long time before a team was able to be declared the win­ner.

What I really want I real­ized tonight, is a throw back to my days as a kid and vis­it­ing the library but mod­ern­ized. I loved check­ing out and rent­ing all those books that I would never have been able to afford to buy (and still wouldn’t). I read a lot back in the day and checked out so many books for pretty much a sin­gle rea­son, about 1/4 of the books just weren’t worth my time to read and would go by the wayside.

Apply­ing Net­flix or Amazon’s pre­dic­tion algo­rithms to my read­ing list and let me put books in a queue to rent, add in Netflix’s keep out for as long as needed and deliver when avail­able elec­tronic copies of a book when avail­able and I would be in heaven.

The idea is purely stolen from Net­flix, but the major­ity of what is needed Ama­zon already has:

• Rela­tion­ship with publishers — √
• Stor­age facil­i­ties and mail­ing sys­tem for fast deliv­ery of books — √
• Elec­tronic ver­sion of books — √
• Soft­ware and deliv­ery plat­form for these ebooks — √
• Queue of books to read — that’s a sorta they’ve got the Wish List but it’s for items to buy lit­tle bit of work and con­verted, bet­ter than half way there
• Rat­ing system — √
• Pre­dic­tion algo­rithms — another mostly there, their algo­rithms are good but some­times get fooled by stuff that you buy on a one shot deal

Get work­ing Ama­zon (or any­body for that mat­ter) and I’ll sign up and buy more books in the process.