Have you ever wished that  you could find new books the same way Pandora helps you find new music? Using a series of algorithms, BookLamp analyzes your favorite books for five style elements and then delivers you customized recommendations with similar themes and style.

BookLamp measures 30,000 points of data for each book in its database. When you enter a specific book in the search engine, it spits-out an extensive list of reading suggestions for you based on that book and author.

The site currently tracks more than 618 million data points, trying to decode the DNA of literature. Here’s BookLamp’s explanation of how it works: “Motion, Density, Description, Dialog and Pacing are stylistic metrics or terms developed to help make the complicated under-workings of our analysis more understandable. They are not the complete picture of what makes up a book’s writing style, nor a complete picture of what BookLamp tracks in a book, but they do measure elements that a person can easily understand.”

The online tool was created by Novel Projects, a company formed to help work on the Book Genome Project in 2003.

Booklamp’s Five Metrics Defined

1. Motion: “Motion refers to the level of physical motion in a scene or book”.
2. Description: “Description refers to the level of descriptive language that the author uses in his or her writing.”
3. Pacing: “Pacing refers to the layout of the text on the page. A scene with high Pacing will have characteristics that quickly move the reader’s eye down the page.”
4. Density: “Density refers to the complexity of the text. Text with high Density will take longer to read than a text of equal length with low density.”
5. Dialog: “Dialog refers to the amount of spoken text between two or more characters in a scene

I gave it a spin with the suggestion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic A Study in Scarlet. Booklamp provided a suggested reading list that included: Oliver Twist, The Moonstone, Frankenstein, Crime and Punishment and When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. I think they have some work to do on the analytics. But give it try and see how it works for you.