TechCrunch is reporting that Apple has bought BookLamp and its Book Genome Project technology. They spent between $10 million and $15 million. After TechCrunch released the report, BookLamp quickly confirmed the sale to Re/code.
BookLamp is a company based in Boise, Idaho that has developed a system of digitally analyzing book content, and showed off its technology in the Book Genome Project. This is presumably a reference to Pandora’s “Music Genome Project," and recommends new material to readers by breaking apart and analyzing books using natural language algorithms. The technology would be useful in the iBookstore. Currently the iBookstore lacks an effective recommendations system to help users find new content. Amazon offers a relatively good recommendation system, simply by looking at other books that customers purchase (as they do with all items). BookLamp counted Amazon as one of their customers, although it’s likely that Apple will terminate that contract once the acquisition is complete.
At Apple’s quarterly conference call for Q3 2014, Tim Cook revealed that Apple had acquired 29 companies in the past nine months (one of which was the much publicized Beats acquisition for $3 billion).
