Like a good friend, Amazon consistently delivers reliable recommendations that hold true to expectations. Now Apple's aiming to do the same by pumping up book recommendations with the hope of luring millions of Amazon shoppers to its iBooks store.
Apple is acquiring BookLamp for between $10 million and $15 million, though the tech company would only confirm the acquisition and hasn't released the specifics of the agreement.
Apple delivered the same generic statement it did after its purchases of Anobit and Locationary and other startups.
"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," stated Apple.
While Apple isn't ready to talk about what the acquisition of BookLamps means for iBooks, it doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to see how Apple's bookstore will become more dynamic with the Book Genome Project powering it.
BookLamp's Book Genome Project scanned through e-books to isolate each book's language, pacing, themes, settings and so on. According to BookLamp CEO Aaron Stanton, the Book Genome Project used thousands of variables to draw out tens of thousands of bits of metadata to describe each book.
"We do this by taking the full text provided by a publisher in a digital format and running it though our computer," Stanton stated. "Our program breaks a book up into 100 scenes and measures the 'DNA' of each scene, looking for 132 different thematic ingredients, and another 2,000 variables."
Stanton used "The Da Vinci Code" as an example. He said the Book Genome Project determined the book was 18.6 percent religion, 9.4 percent murder investigation, 8.4 percent art and 6.7 percent secret societies.
Amazon was said to have been discussing a deal with BookLamps before it opted to purchase GoodReads.
In April 2014, BookLamps cordoned off its website, thanked the project's supporters and said the company's mission was changing.
"This was just the line created for them so that they didn't have to explain what was happening. They've all moved to Apple," an unidentified source states in a news report. "We were wondering when someone would come knocking and asking more questions."
