Those automatic book recommendations made by Amazon and other e-tailers? FAIL. Once the robots of the world can chat me up to a good novel, I’m ready to be ruled by them. That or once they get mounted with solid state lasers and contact grenade launching gattling guns.

It would be wrong, however, to aim too poisoned an arrow at what is an entertaining application. A little digging reveals that Book Seer isn’t, as might have been expected, an affiliate marketing program for Amazon, but a harmless enough publicity-getting project launched earlier this month by a design and marketing company. Winningly, Book Seer also suggests you visit your local bookshop or library, and includes links to directories of both. It has posted some data relating to searches carried out so far here, which you can parse at your leisure. The dominance of Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling seems predictable enough at first glance, but less so when you consider Book Seer’s function: don’t most readers of Meyer and Rowling just read more Meyer and Rowling?