On January 10, the Internet marketing firm fishbat, Inc. releases a new video as part of their “fishbat Splash” series, which aims to keep people informed on the latest news in the world of digital marketing and advertising.

In the latest episode, host and fishbat COO Scott Darrohn discusses a new app that recommends books to Twitter users by analyzing their activity on the social networking site. BookRx, as it’s called, debuted in mid-December. “Have you read any good books lately?” asks Darrohn. “I mean, anybody nowadays can publish a book. And that makes for a huge volume of new releases – I can never seem to find something that I want to read.” BookRx was created as a novel way to deal with exactly this problem, providing targeted book recommendations with no additional effort from the user.

Created in Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, the app uses a special proprietary algorithm to analyze the contents of a user’s Twitter feed, including tweets, hashtags, links and user names. The app uses this information to generate or “prescribe” relevant literary recommendations from a series of premade book lists.

The app was created by Northwest grad student Sean O’Banion and Professor Larry Birnbaum, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Knight Lab is planning to update the app in the near future to provide support for multiple languages other than English.

The app typically suggests books from a few different genres, and helpfully displays the words and hashtags that correspond to the results. “O'Banion said Twitter is like a stream of consciousness,” comments Darrohn, “so it’s the perfect medium to analyze when suggesting books. In other words, BookRx will be recommending a lot of self-help books.”

fishbat, Inc. is a full service online marketing firm. Through social media management, search engine optimization (SEO), web design, and public relations, fishbat strives as a marketing firm to raise awareness about your brand and strengthen your corporate image.