Most recommendation engines optimize for one thing: what’s popular.
That works for a streaming service trying to fill your evening. But reading is different. A book takes hours, sometimes weeks. The stakes of a bad recommendation aren’t “I’ll watch something else” — they’re “I just wasted a month on something I didn’t care about.”
The Problem with Popularity
When a platform recommends based on “readers also bought,” it’s really saying: here’s what the average person in a vaguely similar demographic purchased. That’s useful for selling books. It’s not useful for finding books that resonate with you specifically.
Think about your favorite book. The one you’ve recommended to friends, the one that changed how you think about something. Now ask: would a popularity-based algorithm have surfaced it for you?
Probably not. Because the best books for you aren’t the best-selling books for everyone.
What Taste Profiling Actually Means
At Siftivo, we start with a different question. Instead of “what’s trending,” we ask “what resonates with your taste?”
You pick a handful of anchor books — titles you know and love. Not a rating on a scale of 1-5 (what does a “4” even mean?), but a clear signal: this book is me.
From those anchors, we build a taste profile. Not a genre preference — that’s too blunt. We look at the texture of what you love: voice, pacing, thematic density, emotional register. Two people who both “like literary fiction” can have wildly different taste. We care about the difference.
How It Changes What You Find
The result is discovery that feels like a recommendation from a friend who knows you well. Not “here’s what’s popular in your genre” but “here’s something that shares the qualities you love, even if it looks nothing like what you’ve read before.”
A reader who anchors on The Secret History might get Piranesi. Not because they’re in the same genre — they’re not — but because they share a quality of atmosphere and intellectual obsession that the reader clearly gravitates toward.
That kind of connection is what we’re building Siftivo to make.
Why This Matters
There are more books published every year than any person could read in a lifetime. The bottleneck isn’t access — it’s finding the ones worth your time. And “worth your time” is deeply personal.
We think the future of book discovery isn’t better algorithms for the average reader. It’s better understanding of the individual one.
That’s what we’re building.
