[syvolt]

In contrast to your experience, I've read over 150 books in the past 2 years and around 50 of them have come from Goodreads/Amazon recommendations.

I assume it depends on the genres, especially with something like Goodreads. I mainly only read a single genre so it must be fairly easy for them to recommend me books.

[r3bl]

Yup, I tend to read a lot of genres, going from highly technical ones, to the fiction and science fiction, all the way down to a couple of YA books when I need something really light just to pass my time.

To make the matter even more complicated, I sometimes read books from my own region, not translated into English (which, of course, makes them unavailable on Amazon), so the algorithm would have to count those ones into recommendations too.

I don't think that anyone is investing a lot of effort in solving this gigantic problem. Amazon just wants to sell you more books, it doesn't matter if you read them or not. I don't think that Goodreads has enough of the capacity to make their recommendations actually work for someone as complex as me.