Personalization consists of tailoring a service or a product to accommodate specific individuals, sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. A wide variety of organizations use personalization to improve customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics as well as for advertising. Personalization is a key element in social media and recommender systems. Personalization is affecting every sector of society—work, leisure, and citizenship.
Mobipocket SA was a French company incorporated in March 2000 that created the .mobi e-book file format and produced the Mobipocket Reader software for mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA) and desktop operating systems.
Bookish.com is a content discovery and ecommerce website, which launched in February 2013, devoted to books. The site allows users to browse an extensive database of books and authors, add books to user-created digital "shelves", get custom book recommendations, read editorial content and purchase physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Readers' advisory is a service which involves suggesting fiction and nonfiction titles to a reader through direct or indirect means. This service is a fundamental library service; however, readers' advisory also occurs in commercial contexts such as bookstores. Currently, almost all North American public libraries offer some form of readers' advisory.
Shelfari was a social cataloging website. Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles they owned or had read, and could rate, review, tag, and discuss their books. Users could also create groups that other members could join, create discussions, and talk about books, or other topics. Recommendations could be sent to friends on the site for what books to read.
Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store. The hardware platform, which Amazon subsidiary Lab126 developed, began as a single device in 2007. Currently, it comprises a range of devices, including e-readers with E Ink electronic paper displays and Kindle applications on all major computing platforms. All Kindle devices integrate with Windows and macOS file systems and Kindle Store content and, as of March 2018, the store had over six million e-books available in the United States.
Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website's offices are located in San Francisco.
MovieLens is a web-based recommender system and virtual community that recommends movies for its users to watch, based on their film preferences using collaborative filtering of members' movie ratings and movie reviews. It contains about 11 million ratings for about 8500 movies. MovieLens was created in 1997 by GroupLens Research, a research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, in order to gather research data on personalized recommendations.
Amazon.com has drawn criticism from multiple sources, with questions raised about the ethics of the company's business practices and policies. Amazon has faced numerous allegations of anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior and criticisms of their treatment of workers and consumers. Concerns have frequently been raised regarding the availability or unavailability of products and services on Amazon platforms, as some consider Amazon a monopoly due to its size.
Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon.com's e-book publishing platform launched in November 2007, concurrently with the first Amazon Kindle device. Originally called Digital Text Platform, the platform allows authors and publishers to publish their books to the Amazon Kindle Store.
Prismatic was a social news curation and discovery application for various Web browsers and mobile devices running iOS. It combined machine learning, user experience design, and interaction design to create a new way to discover, consume, and share media. Prismatic software used social network aggregation and machine learning algorithms to filter the content that aligns with the interests of a specific user. Prismatic integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and Pocket to gather information about user's interests and suggest the most relevant stories to read.
News360 was a personalized news aggregation app for smartphones, tablets and the web. It attempted to learn a user's interests by analyzing their interaction with news stories on the app and using semantic analysis and natural language processing to create an Interest Graph and construct a unique feed of relevant content for each user. The app claims an audience of more than 4 million users.
X-Ray is a reference tool, introduced in September 2011, that is incorporated in the Amazon Kindle Touch and later models, Kindle Fire tablets, Kindle apps for mobile platforms, Fire Phones, and Fire TVs. General reference information is preloaded into a small file on the Kindle device or app, so that when the feature is used, there is no need to access the Internet to access such content as dictionary, encyclopedic, or metadata entries, or information about actors featured in a film.
BookLikes is a "social cataloging" website founded in June 2011 by Dawid Piaskowski, a software engineer, e-business analyst and entrepreneur, and Joanna Grzelak-Piaskowska, a linguist and literary scholar. The website allows individuals to freely search BookLikes' database of books and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions and discussions.
Oyster was a commercial streaming service for digital e-books, available for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, and NOOK HD/HD+ devices. It was also available on any web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. Oyster held over 1 million books in its library, and as of September 2015, the service was only available in the United States.
Abby Rosmarin is a model, writer, and influencer. She is the author of Amazon bestselling The Ballerina's Guide to Boxing, as well as The Secret to a Happy Marriage, In the Event the Flower Girl Explodes, Chick Lit , I'm Just Here for the Free Scrutiny, and No One Reads Poetry: A Collection of Poems. She is also known for the viral essay "To The Women Who Choose Not to Have Children". Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, xoJane, MindBodyGreen, Elite Daily, HelloGiggles, Thought Catalog, Elephant Journal, Bustle, and others.
Trove was a social news aggregation web and mobile application, with apps available on iOS, Android, and Fire Phone. Trove is also the name of the company behind the application, which was owned by Graham Holdings.
Theneeds is an online and mobile content discovery platform that helps its users discover articles, news, videos, social posts, and other media tailored to their specific interests.
The Hawaii Project is a personalized book discovery engine. The Hawaii Project provides personalized book recommendations and access to current book news. It tracks curated sources of interesting books and articles, uncovering new texts that align with a user's interests, their favorite authors and current events. The Hawaii Project also provides a social reading app called Bookship, shortlisted for the 2017 Bookseller's Startup of the Year. Users of The Hawaii Project can follow authors and particular sources of writing about books to get alerts about relevant information. It is privately funded.
OwlCrate is a web-based subscription service business specializing in monthly boxes shipped out internationally by mail, themed around books and book collecting. While OwlCrate is largely popular with book reviewers on social media, the service ships books to anybody within select available countries who places an order. Subscription boxes are largely themed around the fiction genres of science fiction and fantasy, with boxes designed both for young children and adolescent readers. Subscription boxes typically contain an exclusive book cover with an author autograph, and a variety of surprise items associated with the book, including coffee mugs, t-shirts, pillow cases, lip balm, stickers, pinback buttons, jewellery and other paraphernalia.
