Amazon’s ‘Your Books’ Lets Customers View Reading History, Recommends Titles

Amazon’s latest offering harkens back to its roots as a bookseller.

The company’s Your Books feature, announced Wednesday (Dec. 13), lets users explore all their books in one place, while offering personalized features to find the next thing to read.

The feature, Amazon said in a news release, shows users every book they’ve bought, borrowed or saved, whether in print, on Kindle or via Audible.

“Simply type ‘Your Books’ in the search bar on the Amazon Store, and the top result will open the Your Books feature,” the release said. “Once there, the Library tab contains every book you have ever bought or borrowed from Amazon. You can organize your library based on things like genres, authors, or series — allowing you to discover which categories you like the most or reveal ones you might want to pursue.”

The library will also help users discover new books. If they want to look at new recommendations based on a single title, a group of titles, or their complete reading history, the Library tab will search through Amazon’s entire selection of books and present options based on the user’s interests.

A report Wednesday by TechCrunch notes that there’s some overlap here with Goodreads, an Amazon-owned platform where people can log and review what they’ve read and get recommendations about their next book.

In this case, however, rather than reading through reviews from fellow Goodreads users, the reviews come from other Amazon shoppers.

This year has seen Amazon invest more in enhancing its review features, in one case by employing artificial intelligence (AI) for a feature that highlights what customers have written in their product reviews.

As PYMMTS wrote, this tool provides a short paragraph on the product detail page that highlights the item’s features and customer sentiment frequently mentioned in reviews to help customers determine if the product in question is right for them.

At the same time, the company announced it had filed suit against two services it accuses of churning out fake product reviews.

“We welcome authentic reviews — whether positive or negative — but strictly prohibit fake reviews that intentionally mislead customers by providing information that is not impartial, authentic, or intended for that product or service,” wrote Vaughn Schermerhorn, director of Amazon’s community shopping effort.

“The new AI-generated review highlights use only our trusted review corpus from verified purchases, ensuring that customers can easily understand the community’s opinions at a glance,” he added.