zenò·dot

    Press notes

    14 August 2026

    What it is

    Zenòdot (zenodot.app) is the largest actively maintained open catalogue of book translations in the world — a free, independent canonical database of its own, built by correlating more than 50 open bibliographic sources with a matching engine of its own. It documents translations and editions across more than 800 languages, treating them all equally, with particular attention to languages minoritized in the publishing market.

    Why it matters

    The world's book infrastructure is built around a handful of major publishing languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, French. A reader of one of those asks once whether a book exists in their language and gets an answer. Outside that handful the question turns hard even with a state behind the language — Danish and Icelandic readers meet the same wall — and for readers of minoritized languages it usually ends in a silence that cannot be told apart from a no. Zenòdot exists to make that answer, and just as often that absence, legible. Treating every language equally is not a feature of the tool; it is the reason it was built.

    Who is behind it

    Ausiàs Tsel, a writer from the Valencian Country. The project is solo-built and has no investors behind it. The public layer is free and will remain free.

    Coverage

    Coverage of Zenòdot to date. Any figures quoted in these pieces are the ones current on their date; the current ones are below.

    In the first person

    Adoption in libraries

    Key figures (verified)

    • 820 languages with at least one documented edition, drawn from a base of over 234 million bibliographic records. On the stricter count, 802 of them hold catalogued editions.
    • Around 65 million editions with a resolved language.
    • More than 70 million author name variants (aliases), across scripts.
    • More than 50 open sources: national-library catalogues from every continent.
    • UNESCO's Index Translationum, released as open data in 2025, is folded in as one more source: 829,377 source records, each listing an original work and its translations, which unfold into 1.77 million editions in this catalogue. Carried forward with respect: not a successor, a continuation.

    What it reveals

    Once open catalogues are correlated, a large share of the translated backlist turns out to be catalogued somewhere yet invisible to readers, booksellers and libraries, especially for languages minoritized in the publishing market. Two examples at the level of a single work: Tirant lo Blanc, the fifteenth-century Valencian romance, gathers 468 catalogued editions, 259 of them in its own language; Mercè Rodoreda's La plaça del Diamant gathers 309.

    Figures policy

    All figures on this page are verified against the live corpus at the date above and updated with each revision of this page. Please cite figures from this page rather than from earlier coverage. Corrections and dated measurements cited by published articles are recorded in a dated, immutable method note at zenodot.app/press/method/2026-08.

    Images

    Home page: search any book — filtering by languages is optional.
    Home page: search any book — filtering by languages is optional.
    Search results: matching works, with your chosen languages surfaced first.
    Search results: matching works, with your chosen languages surfaced first.
    A work page: every catalogued edition, grouped by language.
    A work page: every catalogued edition, grouped by language.

    Share cards

    Every book link shared from Zenòdot carries a live card: the original language first, then the languages where the work is documented — the smallest ones up front. On language pages where no edition is recorded, the card states the gap honestly. The images below are generated live from the catalogue and may be reused with attribution to zenodot.app.

    A work card: the original language highlighted, then the languages where it is documented.
    A work card: the original language highlighted, then the languages where it is documented.
    A demand card: the same work on a language page where no edition is recorded yet.
    A demand card: the same work on a language page where no edition is recorded yet.

    Press contact

    premsa@zenodot.app. Any questions are welcome at this address. Images on this page may be reused for coverage with attribution to zenodot.app.

    Also available in: Español · Català/Valencià · Français