How Tangent works
Tangent is a cross-media recommendation engine. It connects books, films, TV, and podcasts by taste — so a book you loved can lead you to a film, a series, or a podcast that shares its themes. Most tools recommend within one medium; Tangent recommends across all four.
How it works
One taste space across every medium
Every title is embedded in a single 768-dimensional vector space (Google Gemini embeddings), so the similarity between a book and a podcast is directly computable — not just book-to-book or film-to-film.
A canonical-works graph
Tangent maintains a graph that links a work to its versions across media — a novel to its film, series, and audio adaptations — so "where should I start?" has a real, sourced answer instead of a guess.
Thematic taxonomy, not popularity
Every title is classified into a multi-level genre taxonomy and enriched with themes ("Southern Gothic," "moral courage," "unreliable narrator"), so matches are about substance, not what happens to be trending.
By the numbers
Tangent's catalog covers 32,364 titles: 12,858 books, 10,184 films, 5,262 TV series, and 4,060 podcasts. Every title is embedded for cross-media similarity (100% coverage) and 98% carry full descriptions. The canonical-works graph links 2,619 works to 3,977 versions and adaptations across the four media.
Where the data comes from
Film and TV metadata and images come from TMDB, books from Google Books and Apple Books, and podcasts from Apple Podcasts. Where-to-watch information is provided by JustWatch via TMDB. Tangent layers its own cross-media identity, taste embeddings, and thematic enrichment on top.
This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Common questions
How is Tangent different from Goodreads, Letterboxd, or IMDb?
Those each track one medium — books, films, or screen. Tangent connects all four: books, films, TV, and podcasts. It is built to recommend the next thing you will love in a different medium, not just more of the same one.
How does Tangent make recommendations?
It places every title in a shared taste space and finds the nearest matches across media, then re-ranks them by thematic overlap and acclaim. Recommendations are grounded in a real catalog and a canonical-works graph, so they do not invent titles or adaptations.
Does Tangent use AI?
Yes — for taste embeddings and for enriching each title with themes and genres. Recommendations are always grounded in the real catalog rather than generated freely, which keeps them accurate and free of fabricated titles.
Why cross-media?
Taste does not stop at one format. If you loved a literary thriller, the best next thing might be a film, a limited series, or a narrative podcast. Single-medium tools cannot make that jump; Tangent is built for it.
Is Tangent free?
Yes. You can get cross-media recommendations for free, with no account required to try it.