Frequently asked questions

Zenòdot cross-references data from more than 50 bibliographic sources: national libraries from every continent, ISBN aggregators, Wikidata, the historical record of UNESCO's Index Translationum, and community contributions. If a book doesn't appear in any of these sources, we won't be able to show it. This is especially common with self-published works, academic publications or very recent editions. You can try searching with the original title, the ISBN, or adding the author's name. If you still can't find it, it's likely not yet catalogued in our sources.

Zenòdot cross-references data from more than 50 bibliographic sources. None of them is complete: national libraries document mostly what is published within their borders, commercial aggregators have incomplete language metadata, and UNESCO's Index Translationum stopped publishing in the 2000s — we've incorporated its historical record as one source among many. If you know the ISBN of a translation that doesn't appear, you can contribute it directly from the results page — you'll be helping improve the information for everyone.

Because what Zenòdot counts is what is documented in the open catalogues we have been able to bring in so far — not what has been written or published. New sources are added every week and the corpus grows continually, so any figure you see is a snapshot of a particular moment. When a language shows few editions, that tells you which libraries have opened their data and which have not yet — or that the catalogue where that literature lives is not yet accessible — not what its authors have written. The gap belongs to the catalogues and to us, never to the language.

When you type a title, Zenòdot cross-references more than 50 bibliographic sources simultaneously: dozens of national libraries from every continent (Library of Congress, BnF, DNB, BNE, NDL Japan, and many others), commercial aggregators (ISBNdb, Google Books), Wikidata, the historical record of UNESCO's Index Translationum, and community contributions. It then cross-references the data, identifies the work and groups editions by language. The process includes author verification across writing systems, language code normalisation and disambiguation of homonymous titles. It's a complex process and not always perfect — but we try to be as honest as possible with the data we have. Today the corpus spans more than 67 million editions with a resolved language, across 712 language codes, with a pool of more than 70 million author-name variants across writing systems. And one figure explains why cross-referencing matters: roughly 73% of ISBN-bearing editions appear in only one source.

Zenòdot cross-references data from multiple sources to verify that an edition is actually a translation of the work you're looking for. When we can't confirm this with 100% certainty — because the registered author doesn't exactly match, the catalogued language is unclear, or the data is insufficient — the edition appears with this notice. It doesn't mean it's incorrect; it means we couldn't verify it automatically. If you have the edition in front of you, you can help by reporting whether the data is correct using the ⚑ flag.

Wikidata is an open knowledge base that documents, among many other things, which languages a literary work has been translated into. When Zenòdot identifies a work on Wikidata, it can show you all the languages where a translation is known to exist. This doesn't mean we have the specific edition (with ISBN, publisher and year); it means we know it exists. That's why they appear as "without documented edition". Over time, as sources are enriched and users contribute ISBNs, we'll gradually complete this information.

Zenòdot doesn't sell books and earns no commission from any link. For each edition we give you the catalogue record (with the ISBN when it has one) so you can order it from any bookshop or request it at a library, a link to nearby bookshops, and direct searches on federations of independent bookshops for the edition's language market (such as Todos tus libros, Place des Libraires or genialokal), plus Better World Books (second-hand, worldwide shipping) and Kobo (digital). For many older editions or editions in minoritised languages, the library is often the real channel.

Because what makes Zenòdot useful is documenting the book you can't buy: translations into minoritised languages, out-of-print editions, older holdings. Earning from each purchase click would mean earning only from the most commercial slice of the catalogue, and it would slowly start shaping what we show you first. The "Where can I find it?" links are clean searches, with no affiliate codes or tracking parameters, pointing to federations of independent bookshops in each language's market. When an edition is old or out of print, we tell you the real channel: the library.

In three ways. First: if you have a book in front of you and see that Zenòdot doesn't have its edition documented, you can contribute the ISBN. You'll find it on the book's credits page. Second: if you see an edition with incorrect data — wrong language, wrong author — you can report it using the ⚑ flag next to each edition. Third: search. When you look for a book in a language where it isn't documented, Zenòdot records it anonymously and in aggregate. You don't need to do anything else: your search is already the signal. Over time we hope it can help guide publishers about what people want.

Zenòdot is an independent project created in the Valencian Country, and Catalan/Valencian is the project's language of origin. Spanish, English and French are the three languages in which, for now, we can guarantee a quality interface. We would love to have the website in more languages — especially minoritised languages, which is precisely the audience we value the most. If you'd like to help translate the interface into your language, get in touch through the contact page.