How we choose five books
Every book is scored for your child, five are picked one at a time, and nothing on the list is paid for. Here is exactly how.
The one-sentence version
Every book on our list is given a score for your particular child, the five best are taken one at a time with rules that stop them being samey, and each one gets a line saying why it is there.
Every list is built when you ask for it
There is no grid of answers worked out in advance. The combinations come to about half a million, and any of them would be stale the moment the book list changed.
So every book is scored from scratch on every visit. It takes thousandths of a second, and it means the answer always reflects today’s list and today’s rules.
What the three questions give us
The first question gives a stage and a format preference — board pages, flaps, textures. The second gives up to three characters, or one book your child already loves. The third decides whether we hold that level or step up one.
Naming a book quietly overrides the first question. If you tell us your child loves The Gruffalo, we take the level from that book rather than from the description, because a book you own is better evidence than a description of a child. It is the single largest effect in the whole engine.
What each signal is worth
The numbers are the priority order. Matching the format you asked for is worth 100. Sitting at the right stage is worth 60. Being a character you named is worth 45. Resembling the book you named is worth 30.
Then a signal worth 34 that does more work than any of them: whether the book was found because a person put its author on a list, rather than because it fell out of a bulk sweep of a publisher’s catalogue. That is what keeps sticker books and activity packs off the list.
Popularity is worth 18, near the bottom, and that is on purpose. The number counts adults logging their own reading, so it reads zero for Dogger, which is a classic. It breaks ties. It never chooses.
How the five are picked
One at a time, not the top five off the list. After each pick the books that are like it are pushed down, so the same author, the same character and the same theme cannot take the whole set. A book can appear only once, and the book you named is never handed back to you.
The reason lines are written knowing about the whole set, and no two of them may be the same sentence. If the honest angles run out, the line falls back to the book’s length and year rather than repeating one.
Nobody can pay to be on this list
No publisher, shop or author pays to be on this list, and none of them can. The code that ranks the books does not know what anything costs or what anything pays — that information is not in the data it reads.