Book Recommendation Systems: A Survey of Approaches, Techniques, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, Challenges and Future Directions

Abstract

Book recommendation systems (BRSs) play a vital role in digital libraries, online bookstores, and e-learning platforms by assisting users in discovering relevant content from vast collections. Traditional methods, such as collaborative filtering (CF), content-based filtering (CBF), and hybrid techniques, have historically formed the foundation of BRSs; however, they suffer from limitations including the cold-start problem, data sparsity, and overspecialization. In recent years, deep learning–based approaches have emerged as powerful alternatives, leveraging architectures such as CNNs, RNNs, BERT, and Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF) to capture complex user–item interactions and support multimodal integration. This survey is the first to systematically review book recommendation systems published between 2020 and February 2025, filling a critical gap left by earlier studies that did not comprehensively examine this recent period of accelerated research. The paper introduces a novel taxonomy of BRSs that classifies systems according to methodological foundations, approaches, datasets, and evaluation metrics, while also identifying recurring challenges and emerging trends. The findings reveal a clear methodological transition from similarity-driven approaches to neural representation learning, reflecting the increasing demand for intelligent, scalable, and adaptive solutions. Traditional methods, however, remain essential as baseline models for benchmarking and comparative evaluation.