Judging a Book by Its Cover

LV SPECIAL ISSUE DECEMBER 2021, 2021

“There's much to uncover that's not on the cover!” Before a reader turns the pages of any book, his/ her eyes behold the jacket of that book and the author's name on it, which has a bearing on the mind of a possible reader even before the words inside begin to influence. Writers of books don't write books, they write manuscripts. Designing a book cover is the process of getting an author's manuscript into the hands of a reader, by materializing it – giving it a form. Moreover, the covers determine the primary way in which books are marketed and promoted. In addition to other factors, the gender of the writer plays a significant role in the designing of a book cover. Certainly, the covers of books written by women on the whole are differently curated, in illustration and lettering both — the images are ambiguous, painted or misty or eccentrically drawn, and for some unknown reason, 'serif' font is used much more liberally as compared to the covers of books written by men. In this paper, apart from taking into consideration the gender of the writer of a book, book covers are being analysed in two aspects. First, the appearance of book covers which includes the colour scheme, font size, font style and pictures used on the outer jacket. Secondly, it will also be investigated whether the cover of a book also plays a role in deciding the literary merit of the book, which also includes the reasons for winning or losing a literary award. Keywords: Culture, reader-response, reception theory, authorship

Scientific Study of Literature, 2014

What is a genre? What distinguishes a genre like science fiction from other genres? We convert texts to data and answer these questions by demonstrating a new method of quantitative literary analysis. We state and test directional hypotheses about contents of texts across the science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genres using psychometrically validated word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We also recruit the work of traditional genre theorists in order to test humanists’ interpretations of genre. Since Darko Suvin’s theory is among the few testable definitions of science fiction given by literary scholars, we operationalize and test it. Our project works toward developing a model of science fiction, and introduces a new method for the interdisciplinary study of literature in which interpretations of literary scholars can be put to the test.

Journal of Documentation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study what extent readers’ socio-demographic characteristics, literary preferences and search behavior predict success in fiction search in library catalogs. Design/methodology/approach In total, 80 readers searched for interesting novels in four differing search tasks. Their search actions were recorded with a Morae Recorder. Pre- and post-questionnaires elicited information about their background, literary preferences and search experience. Readers’ literary preferences were grouped into four orientations by a factor analysis. Linear regression analysis was applied for predicting search success as measured by books’ interest scores. Findings Most literary orientations contributed to search success, but in differing search tasks. The role of result examination was greater compared to querying in contributing search success almost in each task. The proportion of variance explained in books’ interest scores varied between 5 (open-ended browsing...

Studies About Languages

Informed by the need to study metadiscourse, the present study aimed to compare book reviews and blurbs as examples of disinterested and interested genres in four disciplines of applied linguistics, literature, history, and psychology. The study relied on two corpora: (a) 200 book reviews in each discipline between 2005 and 2015 and (b) 4,282 blurbs in the above disciplines within the same time span. To analyse the texts, Hyland's (2005a) classification of metadiscourse markers was employed. The findings of the study showed that the frequency and type of metadiscourse markers in blurbs and book reviews are genre dependent. Generally, metadiscourse markers were preponderant in the book reviews than in the blurbs (43.3 vs. 32.8 per 1,000 words), which can be ascribed to the functionally dissimilar communicative purposes of the two genres. The insights gained from this study make noteworthy contributions to our understanding of these genres and of how markers of evaluation are verbalized across disciplines and across genres.

This paper presents a program to study communities of readers in print and electronic environments. The electronic environment is considered here as an adjoining reading space in which social interactions prompted by print-based reading are extended.

Proceedings of the American …, 2006

ACR European Advances, 2007

Book covers–a communication means with nebulous boundaries between an ad, a package, and the product itself–have received virtually no attention in research on communication effects. Here, this void is addressed by an examination of one frequently employed front cover design practice–the juxtaposition of a sexually charged image, the book’s title and the author’s name. An experimental approach, involving two fiction books, showed that (a) the presence of cover images with sexual content affected customers’ beliefs about the books’ sexual content and (b) such beliefs contributed to a sense-making process involving emotions, attitudes, and intentions to read the book.

Read related articles on Internet publishing Book jackets provide a model for access to documents on the World Wide Web. They demonstrate a means for making available many of the representational attributes important to making relevance judgments. Such attributes have been posited for retrieval models for some time, but have not been implemented in most formal access systems. Even in the Web environment physical availability is not the same as accessibility. The attribute categories discussed here emerged from 228 book jackets for non-fiction works in a medium size academic library. Models of document searching and book jacket design are discussed in relation to the individual scholarly searcher and new modes of document searching. Contents Assertion Background Initial Examination of Book Jackets Emergent Categories Content Analysis of Sample from an Academic Library

2022

 Genre Analysis  Advertising  Blurbs  Communicative Function  Persuasive Language The aim of this study is to present an approach to the study of book blurbs which are short texts usually included on bookcovers, and also on the Web-pages of publishing houses to supply information about a book to potential readers. This study focuses on four of the biggest publishing and bookselling companies in Turkey. The corpus of the study consists of 20 blurbs of novels from modern Turkish literature chosen by a random sampling. The findings of the study show that blurbs may be considered as a genre which have a definite communicative purpose and they include the use of specific linguistic and rhetoric conventions. In parallel to this, there is a cognitive move structure in blurbs designed by the editors for a specific aim. Blurbs, in this regard, perform an informative function based on the description of the contents of a book. But this function is secondary to their persuasive purpose which is also a characteristic of advertising discourse. It can be suggested that blurbs are attempted to sell the book to the readers, the customers of a publishing company. To reach this communicative purpose, blurbs employ a wide variety of linguistic and rhetoric features similar to advertising genres: complimenting, elliptical syntactic patterns, the imperative, as well as puns, hyperboles, rhetorical questions and excerpts from the book to attract the attention of readers.

2000

The cover was designed by Balázs Schlemmer, with use of the photos of Graeme Williams / MediaClubSouthAfrica.

2013

In recent decades, researchers have indicated that U.S. schools have underexposed elementary grade students to informational text. The increased exposure to this genre should be a top instructional priority. In the present study, we explored 46 third-grade students’ attitudes toward and perceptions of informational text. Using three data sources (a student survey, individual interviews, and logs of independent reading time), we found that students read nonfiction text less frequently than fictional texts and preferred fictional to nonfiction text. Based on these findings, we provided suggestions on how teachers can help young readers diversify their text preferences.

IJRASET, 2021

The present work aims to classify the genre of the books automatically using the Python programming language. A genre is a subset of art, literature, or music that has a distinct form, substance, and style. In many instances, a book can be classified as belonging to more than one genre. It's difficult to categorize a book or piece of literature as belonging to one genre over another. Many novels end up badly categorized or pushed under the super-genre umbrella of fiction since there is no clear criterion to determine how much of a book belongs to a given genre. Therefore, it's critical to develop a system for categorizing books and determining their relevance to a particular genre. Therefore, the current study tries to solve this challenge by combining various text categorization approaches and models to come up with the best solution. I.

Library Collections Acquisitions & Technical Services, 2000

Subject headings for individual works of fiction have appeared on LC cataloging copy from the inception of the OCLC/LC Fiction Project in 1991. This study seeks to determine whether there is any relationship between the number of subject or genre headings per fiction record and mean circulation per record. Analysis of results indicates that no statistically significant correlation exists. Recommendation for a similar analysis of data from a public library is made.

2000

In an effort to understand the impact of designing for digital genres on users' mental representations of structure, a two-phase study was conducted. In phase 1, six expert news readers and a panel of HCI experts were solicited for input regarding genre-conforming and genre-violating web news page design, navigation, and story categorization. In phase 2, a longitudinal experiment with a