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Analyzing Social Book Reading Behavior on Goodreads and How It Predicts Amazon Best Sellers

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Influence and Behavior Analysis in Social Networks and Social Media (ASONAM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

A book’s success/popularity depends on various parameters: extrinsic and intrinsic. In this paper, we study how the book reading characteristics might influence the popularity of a book. Towards this objective, we perform a cross-platform study of Goodreads entities and attempt to establish the connection between various Goodreads entities and the popular books (“Amazon best sellers”). We analyze the collective reading behavior on Goodreads platform and quantify various characteristic features of the Goodreads entities to identify differences between these Amazon best sellers (ABS) and the other non-best-selling books. We then develop a prediction model using the characteristic features to predict if a book shall become a best seller after 1 month (15 days) since its publication. On a balanced set, we are able to achieve a very high average accuracy of 88.72% (85.66%) for the prediction where the other competitive class contains books which are randomly selected from the Goodreads dataset. Our method primarily based on features derived from user posts and genre-related characteristic properties achieves an improvement of 16.4% over the traditional popularity factor (ratings, reviews)-based baseline methods. We also evaluate our model with two more competitive sets of books (a) that are both highly rated and have received a large number of reviews (but are not best sellers) (HRHR) and (b) Goodreads Choice Awards Nominated books which are non-best sellers (GCAN). We are able to achieve quite good results with very high average accuracy of 87.1% as well as high ROC for ABS vs GCAN. For ABS vs HRHR, our model yields a high average accuracy of 86.22%.

This research had been performed when all the researchers were at IIT Kharagpur, India.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In Goodreads, a book shelf is a list where one can add or remove books to facilitate reading similar to real-life book shelf where one keep books.

  2. 2.

    https://hunterswritings.com/2012/10/12/elements-of-the-psychological-thriller-mystery-suspense-andor-crime-fiction-genres/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.writersdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/Essential_Elements.pdf.

  4. 4.

    This research is an extension of our earlier published work [7] at ASONAM ’2017 and reporting a much more detailed analysis emphasizing various aspects of social book reading in more detail and perform detailed comparison of the best sellers with other kind of competitors

  5. 5.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/1995/books.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/aneesha/RAKE

  7. 7.

    https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kellogg School of Management and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Suman Kalyan Maity

  2. Microsoft Research India, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    Abhishek Panigrahi

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

    Animesh Mukherjee

Authors
  1. Suman Kalyan Maity
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  2. Abhishek Panigrahi
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  3. Animesh Mukherjee
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Correspondence to Suman Kalyan Maity .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Firat University, Elazig, Türkiye

    Mehmet Kaya

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

    Reda Alhajj

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Maity, S.K., Panigrahi, A., Mukherjee, A. (2019). Analyzing Social Book Reading Behavior on Goodreads and How It Predicts Amazon Best Sellers. In: Kaya, M., Alhajj, R. (eds) Influence and Behavior Analysis in Social Networks and Social Media. ASONAM 2018. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02592-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02592-2_11

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