Like this? Try these!

A few weeks after I came to San Francisco, I went to the Borders and saw something very interesting. It was a “Like this? Try these” sign, which worked as a book recommendation system.

I’m sure you all know the Amazon’s recommendation system called “customers who bought this item also bought”. I thought this is an offline version of recommendation system. At that moment, I suddenly wondered whether these recommendations by Borders are the same as Amazon’s list of recommendations. So I took a picture of the books and I tried to search those on Amazon.com. In conclusion, the results were totally different.

First, I tried to search the MARCH by Geraldine Brooks on Amazon.com. There were total 49 other books that were purchased with the MARCH. But no book matched the Borders’ recommendations.

Next, I tried to search the Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See on Amazon.com. The result was the same as before. No book matched the Borders’ recommendations, again.

Why is the result totally different? Actually, Amazon’s recommendation system is based on the real sales data so that the recommendations are very trustworthy objectively. Well then, how does the Borders recommend us those books? Here are some possibilities that I thought of:

• The habits that people buy a book at the offline store are very different from the online.
• A book manager chooses the books with his (her) own experience.
• Randomly choose in similar genre.

I like second one of the list even though this is pretty much subjective so that sometimes book that the manager has recommended is not interesting. I’m living on the cutting edge of technology and I can get everything from the internet or the data that has been accumulated but they don’t care about my emotional things. That’s why I prefer the analog works.

And also, this is a good example of expanding user experience from online to offline (Not offline to online). Recently, online experience is getting richer and richer. Even though much experience in offline still leads online experience, more and more it might have effect on each other. It doesn’t matter where we are in real life, online or mobile.