Operation Patterns in Recommendation Systems: Limitations, Functionalities and Performance in the Digital Environment

The Reading Recommendation Systems

The context in which books circulate nowadays is marked by competition with other media that tend to monopolize cultural consumption or, at least, to dilute it by displacing the predominant character books once had. Not only have the number of cultural media formats increased considerably in volume but the patterns of cultural media consumption in today’s society have also changed significantly. Such shifts are triggered by a general increase in leisure time, which is in turn related to the changes in our modes of communicative and cultural production that are geared toward filling this gap (Avilés-Ochoa & Cañizalez-Ramírez, 2015).

One of the most significant societal changes of the past few years, at least in developed countries, has been the gradual reduction of time spent at work, while life expectancy has correspondingly increased. The result of this evolution has been the exponential growth of free time available during a longer life span. A significant portion of modern-day citizens’ daily free time is spent relaxing, and the relationship of most citizens with culture involves the use of some sort of media product (Moon & Song, 2015; Keiser, 2015).

Yet, contrary to what happened in the past, reading is no longer the main instrument of acculturation available to contemporary humans (Cavallo, Chartier & Cochrane, 1999). This has been superseded in mass culture by television, the use of networked computers and mobile phone technologies, the dissemination and widespread use of which has been explosive in recent years (Alonso-Arévalo & Cordón-García, 2015). For the first time, books and other publications increasingly reach audiences that feed on other informative experiences and that have acquired other means of acculturation. Readers are emerging today that have little notion of, and little respect for, texts which have a beginning and an end and that are read according to a sequence established by another (Ulin, 2010). For readers of books this sort of orderly reading is acquired by tradition. However, new reading practices must coexist with the evolution of these other cultural behaviors.

One can speak of a weakening of the boundaries that affect all segments of the book sector. Entertainment technologies significantly influence users, causing changes that represent a genuine transformation in the cultural context (González, Llopis & Gasco, 2015), determining a displacement of books from the centre to the margins.

Reading industries, moreover, are geared for capturing the attention of consumers (Giffard, 2012). The economy of attention is a concept used by some economists to describe relationships between the supply of information and its demand on consumer attention. In order for information to reach its intended recipient, it must consume a valuable resource, attention. The problem lies in the fact that the literary market is complex and multi-faceted, subject as it is to a set of imperatives in which the satisfaction of needs escapes simple definition according to the laws of logic. The motivations of a reader, or consumer, when making a choice belong more to the field of alchemy than to that of reason, even though in the field of book consumption both are related. The singular and unique dimension of each work of fiction interplays with the prototypical and conventional character each book also has, and these complex dynamics distorts the simple insertion of books into the chain of supply and demand within economies of attention, thus defying clear-cut referential parameters that other cultural media competing for attention tend to have.