An Ocean of Books is an interactive map of over 100,000 authors and 145,162 books. On this map every island is an author and every city is a book. Searching the Ocean of Books map by author allows the user to discover nearby writers in close proximity.

Each writer’s island is based on the amount that has been written about them on the web. The more frequently they are mentioned on the internet the bigger their island on the map. The position of the islands and the proximity of authors to each other is determined by the number of connections between them on the internet. If two authors are mentioned in lots of the same articles on the web then the closer they will be on An Ocean of Books.

The connections between authors and therefore their proximity on the map is determined by a machine learning algorithm. If you select an author’s name on the map then you can read a short biography. If you zoom in on an author’s island then all the writer’s books will appear as cities on the map. Click on a book’s title and you can read a short introduction to the selected book.