Amazon

If Amazon is good at one thing, it’s at selling you things—and what better way than to suggest materials related to the one you’re looking at? Amazon includes “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” and “Sponsored products related to this item,” both of which can help you discover titles that are similar to one you’ve already enjoyed. A third feature, “Frequently bought together,” can also lead readers in the direction of a potential new favorite book.

Fantastic Fiction

On its homepage, Fantastic Fiction boasts “Bibliographies for over 40,000 authors.” Now that’s a list! Each author page includes a wealth of information, including books by the author, series they’ve written listed in order, similar authors based on the activity of other users, and relevant genre pages. Genre pages enable filtering by format and provide titles that are coming soon under that genre. Like Goodreads, there’s more to explore on Fantastic Fiction for readers who are interested in novels and the like.

Your Next Read

This database walks you through itself as you go, making it extra user-friendly. Once you’ve navigated to a book’s page, a visual web of similar titles appears around the book in question. Click on one of the surrounding books and that title will float to the center to be surrounded by titles similar to that book with the original title now part of the new book’s web. Your Next Read allows users to create lists of books and can connect with Goodreads accounts.

Whichbook

Using up to four of the descriptor sets, users can choose on a sliding scale how much of one way or another a book should be. For example, on a scale from optimistic to bleak, how do you like your books? Short to long? Expected to unpredictable? With a number of descriptors to choose from, readers can pinpoint the perfect read for them. Pre-created lists enable readers to find books based around a particular concept, while book descriptions also offer links to read-alikes, including a scale that limits by how similar to particular elements of the original book the list is.

LibraryThing

With over two million users, LibraryThing is a sort-of alternative to Goodreads that allows reader reviews. Book pages include reviews, ratings, read-alikes, linked tags, external links to access the books, linked lists the book appears on, and more. LibraryThing describes its primary purpose as one that “helps you create and track a library-quality catalog of your media—books (along with movies and music) you own, have read, want to read, etc.”

Instagram

Perhaps a bit unexpected when it comes to readers’ advisory tools, Instagram can actually be a great resource for the job. Although tag searching is limited to one at a time, plenty of users (often called “Bookstagrammers”) write book reviews, point readers to read-alikes, and tag their pictures and reviews of books with clues to genre and other relevant details.

Gnooks

Gnod, or the “Global Network of Discovery” describes itself as “a self-adapting system that learns about the outer world by asking its visitors what they like and what they don’t like.” In the case of Gnooks, the subject at hand is books. A quick survey of three authors you have enjoyed leads you to a suggestion, which then has three options for the user to select: I like it, I don’t like it, and I don’t know. Once you’ve clicked on one of those options, the system supplies the user with a new author, using that option to inform its new author and to inform future associations. Simple, but effective.

Literature-Map 

Literature-Map is similar to Gnooks (and also by Gnod) in that the reader enters an author’s name into the search bar and the tool produces other options. The cool thing about Literature-Map is that it provides more than one match and visually indicates how similar the options are to the author you started with. For example, if you enter “Jane Austen,” you’ll see the names “Charles Dickens” and “Harper Lee” nearby, while David Sedaris and Terry Pratchett float nearer the margins. Click on another name on the map and that author will be brought to the center as with Your Next Read, and a new set of similar authors will appear.

WorldCat

WorldCat seems to be often overlooked when it comes to its function as one of the many readers’ advisory tools out there. The easiest way to make use of it is to search for a book the reader has enjoyed, find an edition which has been most-fully cataloged, and scroll down to the “Similar Items” pane, where you will see linked subject headings. Clicking on one of those subject headings takes you to a new results list of books that also include that subject. You’re less likely to find an exact match for things like writing style and so on, but WorldCat is immensely helpful when the reader is primarily interested in finding books on similar topics, whether fiction or nonfiction. A number of filters and limiters make the search more precise.