A timeline of major features and events since our birth on April 19th, 2021.
Now, you can find books based on a book you already know and love!
Even better, these recommendations are from fans of that book and not some silly computer algorithm. Try this page with books like Kitchen Confidential (by one of my heroes, Anthony Bourdain).
We added individual book pages to explore each book and why you should read it (try Kitchen Confidential or Dune). We have a lot more planned for this section in the coming years.
We also added a page showing the book lists this book appears on.
This switches the format to one column instead of two, and it shows more about the person making the recommendation (plus, you can meet them and their book). Try our bookshelf on dystopias to try it. This is the finished version as we tried a few different options during testing.
We launched a new recommendation system at the bottom of each book list. This allows readers to keep following their curiosity through the website. Try it at the bottom of Steven Pinker’s list on rationality.
We launched a massive update for the front page that integrates search, book lists, and bookshelves. Prior to this our front page was just a giant list of all the book lists we had so far.
Readers can explore books based on Wikipedia topic, favorite author, and favorite book. Over time we will evolve search as we grow.
Bookshelves are based around topics and help readers explore books in fun ways. We use machine learning and NLP to do this at scale (plus some LOC data). We launched with 1,000+ bookshelves on everything from World War 2 to dinosaurs.
We added related book lists to the bottom of our book recommendation pages so readers can keep following their curiosity. This is a very simple version while we work to build a more accurate recommendation engine.
Shepherd.com (now BookDNA.com) launched publicly on April 19th. We launch with 400 book recommendation lists from authors and 2,000 recommended books. I am so excited to see this live!
After receiving a fantastic response to the concept, I started working on the project full-time in December 2020.