The End of Readers' Advisory?

Well, not yet. Not even for sci fi. But this is extremely interesting.

Beta.BookLamp.org

From their site: BookLamp is a new way to discover new books, using the full text of a book to match readers to books based on writing style, sort of a Pandora.com for books.

Side note: Pandora.com sounds very interesting too.

What these guys have done is scan books (all sci fi so far), and track patterns in terms of sentence length, comma usage, dialogue, etc. So you can ask it for books like X, and get recommendations that match not necessarily in terms of genre or setting or all the stuff currently covered by "If you like, try" sorts of lists, but recommendations that match things like the density of the action in the plotting.

Hmmmm. I really wish they had used mysteries for their beta. I don't read enough sci fi to know if this thing really works.