Choosing a book by its cover: analysis of a reader’s choice

Published date12 March 2018
Date12 March 2018
Pages430-446
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2016-0111
AuthorArūnas Gudinavičius,Andrius Šuminas
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet
Choosing a book by its cover:
analysis of a readers choice
Arūnas Gudinavičius and Andrius Šuminas
Digital Media Lab, Faculty of Communication,
Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Abstract
Purpose The massive growth in the number of book titles has made publishers think about how to attract
a customers attention to particular books. This is the reason why the book cover plays an important role as a
tool of communication with the reader. The research question of this exploratory study is whether the
preference given by readers to book cover colors is different across genders and age groups when they choose
the book in an online bookstore by its cover. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach The experiment in a bookstore and a library was done. Each respondent
was asked to choose one book from our sample of 18 books and a mobile eye tracking laboratory was set up in
order to find out the respondentsbasic gazing data. After conducting an experiment with bookstore and
library visitors, the results showed that younger women tend to select a book by its cover (when the time for
selection is not limited) statistically significantly faster than men of the same age group. The difference
disappears with age.
Findings The data of the experiment suggested that women from the age group 18-35 prefer books with
cool color covers and the preference disappears with age; accordingly, men in the age group 56+prefer books
with warm color covers. The preference was not seen in younger age groups. The analysis of data on
the number of choices for each cover and the time spent looking at each of them revealed a significant positive
correlation between the womens preferences in selecting covers and the time women spend looking at them;
however, there was no such correlation in the case of mens data.
Originality/value The study has shown that the readers book choice is at least partly influenced by the
cover color. The preference given to cool and warm colors and the speed of decision making show certain
differences across genders and age groups. The result contributes to knowing how to create book covers more
adopted to readers needs.
Keywords Publishing, Eye tracking, Book covers,Choosing a book by its cover, Colour preference,Readers
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Over the past years, the publishing market has been facing a lot of challenges all over the
world. Competition between publishers is growing, bookshops are shifting to online
platforms, and the number of book titles is growing. In 2010, Google made an attempt to
count all published books and estimated that there are more than 129 million different books
in the world (Taycher, 2010). According to Bowkers (2014a) data, traditional publishers in
the USA published 304,912 print titles in 2013, whereas the non-traditional publishing
sector (mostly reprint houses specializing in public domain works, self-publishers and
micro-nichepublishers) published 1,108,183 titles. The above numbers could be compared
to another large English language market, the UK. As stated in the report of the
International Publishers Association (Flood, 2014), UK publishers released 184,000 new and
revised titles in 2013 of which 60,000 were digital. We are facing a massive growth in the
self-publishing sector. In 2013, the number of self-published titles in the USA increased to
more than 458,564, up 437 percent over 2008 (Bowker, 2014b). It should be noted that
Bowkers analysis is based on ISBN registrations in the USA and does not include the titles
published, for example, through Kindle Direct Publishing or Nook Press, since
books created there do not need an ISBN. Hence, the real number of self-published book
titles is even bigger.
Nougat (2014) calculated the number of e-book titles in the Amazon Kindle store in
August 2014. Based on the hours of observation, it was estimated that it takes five minutes
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 74 No. 2, 2018
pp. 430-446
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-09-2016-0111
Received 19 September 2016
Revised 13 February 2017
Accepted 25 February 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
430
JD
74,2
for a new book to appear. A year later, on August 25, 2015, we can see that Amazons Kindle
already had 3,918,712 e-book titles. This means that over a year, the bookstore was
supplemented by more than 0.5 million new titles. On the average, one new e-book title
appeared every minute.
The massive growth in the number of titles suggests that a lot of books will remain
unknownbecause an insufficientnumber of people readthem (Dixon et al., 2015). This problem
makes publishers think about how to attract a customers attention to particular books.
A significant role is played by a book cover as an important tool of communication with the
reader. Forexample, Dixon et al. (2015) investigated whetherbook covers can signalsub-genre
informationto knowledgeable readers. The results of their research suggest that book covers
constitute an implicit signaling system between publishers and experienced readers of a
fictional genre and confirm that there is a critical interaction between book covers and genre
knowledge.The cover of the book also plays an importantrole in the process of book selection
and buying. There are a lot of situations where readers choose a book by its cover (at least
partially). This fact makes it important for the publisher to know how to design a successful
cover, so thata book with a more attractive cover which is tailored toward the preferences of a
particular reader can be sold more successfully. There are a lot of questions on how the book
cover communicates with the reader, the investigation of which is still pending.
Our research question was:
RQ1. Whether the preferences for book covers are different across genders and age
groups of readers when they choose a book in an online bookstore by its cover?
Some elements of a book cover play an important role in the cover and reader
communication process. We decided to limit the scope of our research to the analysis of their
dominating color. Therefore, to provide the background for our research question, we first
discuss the intuitive idea that the dominating color of a book cover communicates
information to prospective readers. Dixon et al. (2015) conclude that studies of the book
publishing industry mostly focus on either the mechanics of book cover production, or book
covers appear to have little importance at all. This suggests that publishers have a largely
intuitive sense of how readers evaluate book covers and why covers might be important.
This conclusion matches the opinion of the book design team from the largest book
publisher in Lithuania, which we had consulted before the experiment: With a lot of
practical experience in the field, we intuitively know how to create successful covers for our
readers.However, the results of our exploratory study showed that not all instances of
book cover communication are so obvious, even for experienced professionals.
The main researchquestion was divided intosub-questions. We were interested in how the
readers preferences are distributed between cold and warm colors dominating on the book
cover. How do these preferences change with age and between genders? Do readers look
longer at the covers they like? Since we were using eye tracking equipment in our research,
additional research questions were added in order to get a better understanding about the
processof communication betweenthe cover and the reader. Thus,we turn to the investigation
of reader behavior parameters by measuring which gender needs more time to complete the
selection process and to choose a book by its cover (and how it changes with age), as well as
the time the respondents spent lookingat a particular cover (in orderto find out the correlation
between the time spent looking at the cover and the preference for a specific cover). Finally,
this exploratory experiment suggests that there are important distinctions regarding color
preference across genders and age groups as well as differences in the book selection speed.
Communication via book cover art and colors
As suggested by Dixon et al. (2015), the common-sense assumption that book covers
communicate something to prospective readers is widely held.Color and cover art are
431
Choosing a
book by
its cover

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