The New Chrome Extension “100 Million Books” Fascinates Book Lovers

So far, 100 Million Books has been the most creative chrome extension by Steve Jain, apparently. With this extension, every new opened tab is presented with a random book recommendation. The tab includes the cover and a short passage of text, to give some idea of what it’s about. But wait! It is not another bland, uninspiring book recommendations plugin based on one’s browsing history. What makes it unique is that these recommendations are handpicked and curated by Steve Jain, the creator of the extension himself. This is one of the most differentiating factor which makes this extension unique and infinitely inspiring instead of the artificial recommendations that fail to trigger any emotions or motivation in people. 

Well, something is better than nothing. On the same lines, replacing a blank page on opening a new tab with something more useful and inspiring would be so much better instead of looking at that completely blank one. It could be seen as a friendly reminder to read an interesting book and help people discover new books and make them realise the infinite perspectives out there and millions more they won’t ever be able to know. 

This extension is in place because of the fact that algorithms are everywhere today but they are simply no substitute for certain things, enjoyed in their raw and classic form.

Now why the name 100 Million Books? One may think. 

Not that it’ll show a random title from millions available. This number describes how many books have been published in the world, which currently is over 129 million.

However, this extension does not allow any filters, as has been said on it’s description page on the chrome web store: 

“There’s no way to pick categories and no way to follow your friends. You won’t ever see ads or affiliate Buy links in your face. Ever. Just quality, hand picked ideas. Some you’ll love, some you’ll hate, and some you won’t be sure how to react to at first.

And if you’re in a rush, just ignore it and keep going.” 

One can also not expect to have links to Amazon or Goodreads or other online stores where you could buy the recommended books. Neither can we expect this apparently, since personalisation would defeat the extension’s purpose of presenting raw, unfiltered inspirations in the form of books, to let people discover and feel the need to read them. 

This, however, cannot be seen as a limitation of the extension. One actual limitation that lots of folks have faced is that it does not show the website thumbnails from Chrome’s regular New Tab- which could be presented in a single line in some corner of the tab. But Steve Jain is apparently gong to add this soon. 

If you’re a techie and all this time has been wondering how this extension was made, then let us break the ice to you that Chrome extensions are basically open source which means that its source code is made available to anyone and for any purpose and are a popular tool of web developers. It is just simple PHP Script connected to a MySQL database. 

Currently, this extension is available for Chrome only. If you use other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera, you can make 100 Million Books your homepage by adding the following link-

100millionbooks.org/standalone/ 

If you are someone who would prefer being presented with a handpicked recommended book, every time you open a tab to a blank monotonous page and would love to discover the infinite number of books in the world, then you absolutely must try this extension and get inspired by those infinite perspectives.