Re: BOOKS/REQUEST: Most popular fiction titles?

Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.netcom.com)
Fri, 04 Apr 1997 01:12:15 -0500


At 21:40 04/03/97 +0000, my inner geek wrote:
>
>I wonder if you could buy this kind of data from
>Visa/Mastercard/Amex? Maybe you could entice them into using your
>technology? Maybe license it to them in exchange for "anonymized"
>data that you could analyze?

It appears that at this point nobody has a decent representation
of the taste space. Purchase data and bestseller lists are generic
and do not tell you what books are bought by different kinds of
people; also, they reflect current trends, but not the books that
people could have read 10 or 20 years ago. Reading lists are usually
specialized. Also, tastes and purchases are quite different things.

(Besides, nobody has a database representing extropian tastes -
which is one of the reasons I asked for advice on this list).

It would be very interesting to do some real-time analysis of
taste trends - this would allow, among all other things, to predict
sales data for various products, and the market value of the
companies that produce them...

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Alexander Chislenko Home page: <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
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