More Books You May Enjoy

The Internet is a place of diverse and endless subjects. Anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the past decade knows that the Internet is also a place of diverse and endless advertisements. Sometimes they are in-your-face banners, and sometimes they appear in the form of the slightly more inconspicuous product recommendation. My emails to friends often contain wide and strange assortments of subjects and I've always enjoyed the website recommendations that Gmail suggests for me by picking up keywords in my correspondence. A few years ago while I was in school, I wrote a post about the interesting assessment that YouTube made of me based on its video suggestions. Amusing as the assortment was, I think that considering the selection of videos on YouTube a person would have to display incredibly suspicious viewing habits to be red-flagged. But the other day, I was presented with perhaps the most troubling product recommendation I've seen to date, and it came from Chapters.

I absolutely love Chapters and, even more, I love ordering books from the Chapters website. This is probably because I enjoying receiving mail so much. It truly is a dying practice. So, I occasionally receive emails from Chapters regarding promotions or certain books, and a section of "More books you may enjoy" is included at the bottom. More often than not, the books listed there are books by authors I've searched and it's common that they're books I've already read, so it's not the most useful tool for me. This particular email's recommendation maintains that uselessness, but I cannot figure out what triggered the selection of these three books and, more importantly, these three subjects:

Diet & Weight Loss, Self-Help, and Christianity. Plus, there's a horse on the cover of the middle book! (We all know how I feel about horses.) I thought Chapters knew me better than this. If I was asked to list the Top Three subjects that I'm least interested in reading about, I would probably spout these off without even thinking. "Clowns" and "Ventriloquism" would round out the Top Five. What is Chapters trying to tell me? Does it think I need to diversify? Is it judging me? Mocking me? Honestly, I'm kind of scared.