This post is part of a series entitled, "Just Say Not to AI." Click here to pull up all the posts in this series (in reverse chronological order). For the first post in this series, click here.
I used to confidently recommend people simply google to find readalikes for popular books, especially those catch us off guard buzzy books. For example, "readalikes for Theo of Golden."
Well in the current world, I cannot recommend that anymore and it is not just because the first responses are AI generated and cannot be trusted for a variety of reasons from ethical to that fact that (most notably ]many of the results will turn out to be hallucinated. But, and I hate to write this, but I also do not trust other libraries to have created lists using their own brains.
I am hearing stories about and even seeing library trainers actually say that AI can do readalikes better than you staff. Their professional recommendation is to stop "wasting" time on readalikes.
This is flat out wrong. Readalikes done by a computer are bad. They match plot points not appeals. When trained humans do this work, that is where readers are connected with books they knew nothing about before we suggest them, books they fall in love with, books that bring them back for more and keep them reading.
My core training programs not only teach this, but I prove it both with myself and have the attendees prove it with their own reading throughout the course of the training itself. I show how reader's brains cannot be understood with algorithms. How what people like about a book cannot be plotted on a graph. And I illustrate how four people can describe four different version of the same book.
And when we are talking about readalike for the buzziest of books (like Theo of Golden), we need humans helping readers on the ground to give us the titles our readers are clamoring for. I tend to go to Reddit first in these circumstances (as I wrote about here). This resource is the best way to crowdsource (from humans) an answer to a popular request. Click this link to see a list of Reddit discussion with suggestion for fans of Theo of Golden. That is a google search but in which I include Reddit as a term and as a result only get Reddit results. There are MANY.
But there are other places where you can rely on humans to not only help you with readalikes, but also keep you abreast of the books for which you will need those readalikes.
Library Journal and LibraryReads work together every week to identify the books with the most holds across America and then offer readalikes for that title. I wish they had a landing page to get at this easier, but in lieu of that, I crafted a search at this link which will bring that rescue up in reverse chronological order.
Book Riot is also my favorite place for human created reading lists and suggestions for the buzziest of books. Their job is to literally provide the content their readers most want. As a result, if something is even slightly popular, they have a plethora of resources that allow you to help readers.
Take this article with readalikes for Project Hail Mary as a great example. You get readalikes first and then at the end of the article links to other content they have created which you might also like.
They do this for everything, all the time. Their lists are guaranteed to include marginalized voices. And they are paying humans to create this content. Please support it by using Book Riot as one of your first line resources-- not GOOGLE. Your support with clicks will keep them in business, meaning that the human knowledge stays free. (note: I know Book Riot has some content behind a paywall, but that is more directed at readers. For our purposes, what we need is free.)
Finally, I do want to mention NoveList as an option. NoveList is also 100% Human created, but it is not free. They have people applying metadata to their titles using controlled, human created, language. They also cross reference various human created sources, and layer it all with lists and content written by their employees and contracted librarians. It is a database that is built on the work of humans.
But even though NoveList has been around for a while, I am not going to lie, I have serious concerns about human created resources all ending up behind a paywall in the future. Like AI will be free but we are going to have to pay for humans. That will be a nightmare, and I don't think it is too far fetched for me to predict this with the way we are going now.
Just please, be careful. Be proactive as you provide "while you wait" readalikes for the most popular titles, but make sure the resources you use to identify those titles are made by humans.
