Operations · 2026-05-01 · Reading time ~ 5 min
Why Are There Two Slugs for the Same Book? Pagera's Variant-Edition Policy
Aozora Bunko sometimes registers the same work under two slugs — old and new orthography. How does Pagera handle these variants? Here's our policy, in the open.
Pagera Editorial
If you search Pagera, you'll occasionally see the same Japanese work twice. Here is why — and what we do about it.
Why two slugs
Aozora Bunko (青空文庫) — Japan's public-domain text repository — registers a single work under multiple base editions: old kana spelling vs new, old kanji vs new, different publishers' base texts. Pagera ingests all of Aozora's entries, so variants come in as separate slugs.
Pagera's four-step variant test
Before we translate a new work, we run:
- DB title match against already-published works.
- Anchor count comparison.
- First 1,500 chars: word order, punctuation, anchor IDs.
- Final 800 chars: ending alignment.
If all four match, we mark the variant isHidden=true: data preserved, but users don't see the same work twice in search.