  In recent years, research in text summarization has mainly focused on the
news domain, where texts are typically short and have strong layout features.
The task of full-book summarization presents additional challenges which are
hard to tackle with current resources, due to their limited size and
availability in English only. To overcome these limitations, we present "Echoes
from Alexandria", or in shortened form, "Echoes", a large resource for
multilingual book summarization. Echoes features three novel datasets: i)
Echo-Wiki, for multilingual book summarization, ii) Echo-XSum, for
extremely-compressive multilingual book summarization, and iii) Echo-FairySum,
for extractive book summarization. To the best of our knowledge, Echoes, with
its thousands of books and summaries, is the largest resource, and the first to
be multilingual, featuring 5 languages and 25 language pairs. In addition to
Echoes, we also introduce a new extractive-then-abstractive baseline, and,
supported by our experimental results and manual analysis of the summaries
generated, we argue that this baseline is more suitable for book summarization
than purely-abstractive approaches. We release our resource and software at
https://github.com/Babelscape/echoes-from-alexandria in the hope of fostering
innovative research in multilingual book summarization.
