Searching in an ocean of 130M books
There are so many published books. It's difficult to find the best for you.
So many options
There are so many published books: the number of ISBN-registered books was ~130M in 2010.1 Yet there is no effective way to search through this ocean of content to find the best material for you.
Because of the ocean of choice, I think that the books that I know are probably insignificant in their personal impact on me compared to the optimal books for me. The ‘best’ books for me are somewhere in the world, undiscovered by me.
Flawed recommendations
A large number of optimal book candidates, perhaps the majority, are inaccessible to me. Maybe, like my godfather who published several children's books but is uninterested in marketing, they are sitting on someone's shelf or hard drive.
Focusing on the content that I could access, existing recommendation systems seem flawed.
They either are: a) too simple, providing recommendations based on content that people with similar interests have read that the company has in stock, or b) biased by advertising spending to show you popular and mediocre content.
Amazon asks me to buy the 'Lean Startup' by Eric Ries several times a week. In contrast, there must be so many amazing, life-changing books out there that I could access right now by clicking the browser bar at the top of this page, and tapping a few keys on this keyboard. But I don't know what to type.
I wonder what a personal content recommendation system, which aimed to find the best possible content for you would look like. I bet that it wouldn't ask me to read Eric Ries.