Which book?

From my friend Stephen comes a link to whichbook.net, a site that claims to give “readers an enjoyable and intuitive way to find books to match their mood.”

There have been many other kicks at this can, perhaps most famously the firefly project that came out of MIT.

Unlike commercial services that seek to use aggregated reader/listener/viewer preferences to drive sales, whichbook.net is a non-profit setup, run by librarians.

While I’m sure this service will be useful to some — Stephen says “I threw in some criteria and got books that i had read that fit the bill perfectly and some books i hadn’t read.” — I’m perplexed by this set of selections. Do people really choose books this way? Do you say to yourself “I could use a good read, something extremely gentle, a little disgusting and very bleak?”

I realize that my random “books that have interesting covers” method is prone to failure, but this seems a little too intentioned for my tastes. Like genetic engineering for books.