Bionic bookselling

There’s a false dichotomy that’s running rampant in tech circles: that algorithmic discovery and human curation are in tension against one another. It’s just not true. Let’s go beyond “customers who bought X also bought Y” and shape a journey of discovery responsively by having humans do the bookselling work of identifying great reading experiences, while machines identify the readers who’ll most appreciate hearing about them. Discoverability is alive and well; what’s dead is the notion of a single user experience of any discovery journey.