Publish EPUB rankings of books
I have been playing around with the difficultly rankings generated by Readlang.
I am not convinced that the "B2" "C1" etc labels are that useful. I am convinced that really map onto these levels in a meaningful way. However, a couple of quick and dirty tests I have done to test the algorithm suggests that it does generate something that correlates with the difficulty of the book.
Would it be possible to publicly list the relative rankings of novels uploaded to Readlang? It would be really helpful to know for instance, that a certain author is in the "B2" range or better that they are more difficult that X-author but harder than Y-author.
Of course, this is only a rough estimate, but I would certainly find it useful.
I agree that the difficulty grades are very rough and not as useful as they should be. I’ve been planning for a long time to open source the algorithm, which is very simple, with some tests, so that others could help improve and calibrate it for different languages. The trouble is I have a lot of other things to do and extracting this code, creating tests, and documenting it never seems like a high enough priority. I would make it a priority if I were convinced that enough people would contribute to it.
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patrickw commented
I agree this is not super-urgent. I think it's a nice feature even if rough. I guess the pedantic side of my nature doesn't like seeing the books listed as "B2" etc, because such labels seem unjustifiable given the roughness of the ranking, but it's still useful.
What about giving a numerical score? Or just "easy" "intermediate" "advanced"?