Abstract. Amazon.com paved the way for several large-scale, behavior-based recommendation services as an important value-added expert advice service for online book shops. In this contribution we discuss the effects (and possible reductions of transaction costs) for such services and investigate how such a value-added service can be implemented in the context of scientific libraries. For this purpose we present a new, recently developed recommender system based on a stochastic purchase incidence model, present the underlying stochastic model from repeat-buying theory and analyze whether the underlying assumptions on consumer behavior hold for users of scientific libraries, too. We have analyzed the logfiles with approximately 85 million http-transactions of the web-based online public access catalog (OPAC) of the library of the Universität Karlsruhe (TH) since January 2001 and performed some diagnostic checks. A test prototype is already operational and is currently being evaluated. The recommender service will be fully operational within the library system of the Universität Karlsruhe (TH) by the end of June 2002.