Apple confirmed on Friday that it had acquired book analytics firm BookLamp – a “Pandora for Books” – back in April to bring improved discovery and analytics to its iBookstore digital book store.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, TechCrunch reports Apple bought BookLamp and its so-called Book Genome Project technology for between $10 million and $15 million. The company confirmed the sale to Re/Code minutes later.
The Apple confirmation was in the usual form of, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
The Boise, Idaho-based BookLamp digitally analyzes book content, and offers recommendations and discovery of new reading material by analyzing the books via natural language algorithms.
Apple is thought to have purchased BookLamp to improve their iBookstore’s content discovery system, which has proven lacking for users. The startup’s specialized software can parse words and sentences to ferret out such metrics as genre, themes, and pacing.
