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Recommendations for books in languages other than English
Aug 13, 2021
The title basically. Even though I have more non-English books on my shelves than English books, I only get English recommendations (and yes, I have written Dutch in my reading preferences). Would be nice if the algorithm can be changed so it will be less biased to English books.
Comments
I am also here to support this. Hopefully, it will be available at some point (after reading the previous feedback).
The recommendations list is great and useful, but everything is in English. It would help if users could filter recommendations by language, or if the system took into account the language they usually read in.
As someone not based in the US/UK, I often have to check whether a recommended book is available or translated in my country. Otherwise, many suggestions end up being useless. Might also be useful to local writers, that don't have their books translated in English yet.
Of course, only you can decide if it's worth investing in such a feature, depending on how many non-English users you have.
I came here to make the same request but found that someone had already suggested it. Is the situation still the same? I would really like to see books from my own country, or books translated to finnish but which have no English translation available, in the recommendations as well. Currently its only books in English, and even though they might interest me, many of them are so niche that they arent available here in the libraries or book shops... Which makes the recommendations pretty much useless for me.
oksi It's still the same for now since we've not been able to prioritise language features much in recent years but it will be reviewed at some point.
Hi tamara! This is something that we won't be able to do for a very very long time. The way we've done our recommendations, we'd essentially have to develop a new model for each language and the team is only really fluent in English. We're still working on our current algorithm every day and it's already been in development for almost two years. We may be able to do a better job sooner of showing you editions in languages you read in, but the base recommendations will be based off of English books.
Oh, that's a little disappointing to read as someone who also reads in four languages.. I figured the recommendations were mainly based on the tags in al categories, which would be the same in other language. But I understand if it is much more complicated than that.
To clarify: we'll be able to show you books in other languages that you read in, but a book will be unlikely to show up in our recommendations algorithm if no English edition of it exists!