One of the marketing emails I get is from Audible with recommendations for books I might like to listen to. Here's a new book by one of your favorite authors! Or so they say. I open the email and almost every time it's recommending an author I don't remember ever reading/listening to before.
Audible is owned by Amazon and I thought they had some pretty strong algorithms based on past purchases. Literally 99% of the books I spend my credits on are non-fiction, but 99% of my recommendation emails are for fiction. Say what? Also, they seem to be heavily weighted toward authors that I downloaded via a free listen promotion. Um, just because I took advantage of the free book, doesn't mean I want to listen to every book that author has ever written.
I wondered if maybe my Audible recommendations were skewed by my Kindle purchases/downloads, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I get recommendations for books that I never downloaded in ebook form, but did download in Audio.
There was a free download of the book American Pharaoh because of the Kentucky Derby. Guess who's getting recommendations about books with horses now?
What I'd like to see is recommendations based on what I used credits for or even spent money to purchase. Free downloads are like, well, okay, yeah, maybe I'll listen to that some day and it's free so why not? They are not anything to base my likely future purchase history on.
My favorite audio books are educational. For example, The Great Courses which are recordings of college professors lecturing about subjects they teach about at university. I totally geek out over this and have a huge number of these in my library. Do you think I ever get a recommendation for another Great Courses listen? Do you think I get notified when there's a new Great Course available? The answer to this is apparently not.
Since Audible doesn't seem to know me at all, I mostly delete all their recommended listen emails after a quick scan. Just in case they finally figured me out.
***This blog is solely my own opinions and not sponsored in anyway. I pay for my Audible membership and my ebooks on my own with no promotional considerations of any kind.***
