Ondrej Holzman When announcing Apple's financial results for the past quarter he revealed, that in the last nine months he managed to buy out 29 companies. However, Apple did not share many acquisitions with the public. It has now emerged that one of them was related to the service BookLamp.
The acquisition was supposed to happen a few months ago, and the BookLamp service fits into Apple's portfolio. This startup focused on providing personal recommendations to book readers, for which it used special algorithms. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and generally does not discuss its intentions or plans," Apple traditionally confirmed to the magazine Re / code.
BookLamp's project was called Book Genome, and it was a mechanism that analyzed the texts of the books it dissected based on various genres and variables, and through that, recommended readers to read similar books that they might like.
We can demonstrate the functionality of Book Genome on a book The Da Vinci Code. Her analysis showed that 18,6% of the book is about religion and religious institutions, 9,4% about the police and murder investigation, 8,2% about art and art galleries, and 6,7% about secret societies and communities. It was on the basis of this data that Book Genome presented other similar titles to the reader.
Magazine TechCrunch, which with information he rushed is the first to claim, citing sources, that Apple paid between $10 and $15 million for the Boise, Idaho startup. The acquisition apparently took place already in April, when BookLamp thanked users for their support on its website and, referring to the company's further development, announced that the Book Genome project was ending.
"At first, Apple and BookLamp discussed increasing their contract, but eventually they started talking from a strategic point of view," he told TechCrunch one of the unnamed sources. Apple wasn't the only BookLamp customer, Amazon and other publishers were among them. "Apple wanted them to do whatever they did directly for them," the unnamed source explains the reason for the acquisition, adding that Apple no longer wanted to share the service with anyone.
It is not yet clear how exactly Apple will use the BookLamp technology, however, according to some, we will see a significant initiative in the area of books and reading from the Californian company in the coming months. Currently, the integration of the search and recommendation mechanism into the iBookstore is mainly offered.
