Goodreads, the social network for book lovers, has taken a leaf out of the Netflix playbook. Instead of recommending movies, however, Goodreads will suggest new books for users to check out.

Goodreads was started in 2006 for people who wanted to discuss books in an online environment. Users have been requesting a recommendation system for some time, but developing such a service takes a lot of hard work and a good slice of luck to do just right. In order to tackle this problem, the company has acquired fellow startup Discovereads, which has a strong recommendation algorithm.

Within the next few months, Discovereads will be integrated into Goodreads, which will use its database of more than 100 million book ratings from 4.6 million users to develop the recommendation engine. Discovereads analyzes book trends and builds recommendations based on your ratings of books. By combining an automated service with recommendations from friends, Goodreads aims to create a system that ensures you will only receive recommendations for books based on your personal tastes so you don’t have to waste time reading through books you end up not enjoying.

“A few months ago, Otis Chandler, CEO of Goodreads, discovered Discovereads and we began to discuss ways to work together,” said Discovereads CEO Kyusik Chung. “It quickly became clear that merging and working together as a single company made the most sense. Goodreads has the biggest online community of book lovers (over 4.6 million users!) and Discovereads has the best book recommendation system online. We were a scrappy and agile startup, and so were they. We couldn’t imagine a more perfect fit.”

Goodreads also hopes that the acquisition will help it to improve its targeted advertising. While authors and publishers can already advertise directly to Goodreads users, it hopes that Discovereads algorithms will help it develop an advertising model that will display ads for books that users are already likely to be interested in.

I don’t read books nearly as often as I should, but I will definitely be checking out the recommendation engine when it is live. I don’t like to waste my time with any entertainment I end up not enjoying, so having book recommendations tailored to my tastes is an instant win for me.