作者曾是GroupLens(http://www.grouplens.org/)的研究成員，2005年博士畢業，論文題目就是"Towards Decentralized Recommender Systems"。從頁數來看，這本書應該就是這篇論文，可以直接下載 http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~cziegler/papers/A4-Thesis.pdf

Automated recommender systems make product suggestions that are tailored to the individual needs of the user and represent powerful means to combat information glut. However, their practical applica­bility has been largely confined to scenarios where information rele­vant for recommendation making is kept in one single, authoritative node. Recently, novel distributed infrastructures are emerging, e.g., peer-to-peer networks and the Semantic Web, which could likewise benefit from recommender system services, leading to a paradigm shift towards decentralized recommender systems. In this book, we investigate the challenges that decentralized recommenders bring up and propose techniques to cope with those issues. The spectrum ranges from the use of product classification taxonomies, alleviating the sparsity problem, to trust propagation mechanisms designed to address the scalability issue. Empirical investigations on the corre­lation of interpersonal trust and interest similarity provide the com­ponent glue that melds these results. The book is geared towards academic readers and practitioners alike, with a focus on both implementable algorithms as well as new socio-psychological insights.