Abstract
What people choose to read is believed to be highly influenced by their cultural backgrounds and environment. Thus, understanding the cultural and socioeconomic factors that have significant relations with the reading preferences of nations can be of great importance for the book retail industry. These insights can have applications in recommender systems, sales predictions, and customer relationship management. Motivated by these values, we conducted a large-scale cross-country analysis of cultural similarities and differences based on book preferences using data collected from Goodreads. We use bipartite configuration model and community detection to explore the relationships between countries based on their book preferences. We also investigate the similarities between countries based on their favorite genres and authors. Additionally, this paper explores the significance of cultural, lingual, and socioeconomics factors on book preferences using quadratic assignment procedure statistical tests. Our results indicate that geographical distance, lingual distance, cognitive ability, intelligence quotient, and individualism are all significantly associated with book preference at the country level.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the Most Read Books repository, https://github.com/nazaninsbr/Most-Read-Books
References
Addey C (2008) Readers and non-readers: a cross-cultural study in Italy and the UK. Aracne
Alaveras G, Gomez-Herrera E, Martens B (2018) Cross-border circulation of films and cultural diversity in the EU. J Cult Econ 42(4):645–676
Annalyn N, Bos M, Sigal L, Li B (2018) Predicting personality from book preferences with user-generated content labels. IEEE Tran Affect Comput. https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2018.2808349
Bastian M, Heymann S, Jacomy M (2009) Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. In: Third international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media
Blondel V, Guillaume J, Lambiotte R, Lefebvre E (2008) Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. J Stat Mech Theory Exp 2008(10):P10008
Brunsø K, Grunert K (1998) Cross-cultural similarities and differences in shopping for food. J Bus Res 42(2):145–150
Butts CT, Butts MC. Package ‘SNA’
Callahan E (2005) Cultural similarities and differences in the design of university web sites. J Comput Mediat Commun 11(1):239–273
Chan S R, Edo J, Bee H R (2016) Global habitus: collectivist and individualist values in cultural capital among Chinese Malaysian youth. J Malays Stud 34(1):35–57
Dimitrov S, Zamal F, Piper A, Ruths D (2015) Goodreads versus amazon: the effect of decoupling book reviewing and book selling. In Ninth international AAAI conference on web and social media
Driscoll B, Rehberg SD (2019) Faraway, so close: seeing the intimacy in Goodreads reviews. Qual Inq 25(3):248–59
Fredrickson MM, Chen Y (2019) Permutation and randomization tests for network analysis. Soc Netw 59:171–83
Ger G, Belk RW (1996) Cross-cultural differences in materialism. J Econ Psychol 17(1):55–77
Hofstede G (1984) Cultural dimensions in management and planning. Asia Pacific J Manag 1(2):81–99
Hofstede G (1986) Cultural differences in teaching and learning. Int J Intercult Relat 10(3):301–320
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?name_desc=false. Accessed 4 Feb 2020
https://www.ezglot.com/most-similar-languages.php. Accessed 5 Feb 2020
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/14538341-who-is-the-average-goodreads-user-you-ll-be-surprised. Accessed 4 Feb 2020
https://www.hofstede-insights.com/models/national-culture/. Accessed 7 Feb 2020
Johnson DD (1973) Sex differences in reading across cultures. Read Res Quart 67–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/747228
Joy S, Kolb DA (2009) Are there cultural differences in learning style? Int J Intercult Relat 33(1):69–85
Kofmel K (2013) Solitary act and social interaction: adults reading science fiction and fantasy. In: Proceedings of the annual conference of CAIS
Kousha K, Thelwall M, Abdoli M (2017) Goodreads reviews to assess the wider impacts of books. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol 68(8):2004–2016
Liu M, Hu X, Schedl M (2018) The relation of culture, socio-economics, and friendship to music preferences: a large-scale, cross-country study. PLoS ONE 13(12):e0208186
Lynn R, Meisenberg G (2010) National IQs calculated and validated for 108 nations. Intelligence 38(4):353–360
Maity SK, Panigrahi A, Mukherjee A (2017) Book reading behavior on Goodreads can predict the amazon best sellers. In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining
Mayer T, Zignago S (2011) Notes on CEPII’s distances measures: the geoDist database. SSRN Electron J. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1994531
Mazzoni SA, Gambrell LB, Korkeamaki RL (1999) A cross-cultural perspective of early literacy motivation. Read Psychol 20(3):237–253
Neal Z (2014) The backbone of bipartite projections: inferring relationships from co-authorship, co-sponsorship, co-attendance and other co-behaviors. Soc Netw 39(1):84–97
Rindermann H, Sailer M, Thompson J (2009) The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competence of peoples on social development. Talent Dev Excell 1(1):3–25
Saracco F, Straka M, Clemente R, Gabrielli A, Caldarelli G, Squartini T (2017) Inferring monopartite projections of bipartite networks: an entropy-based approach. New J Phys 19(5):053022
Schutte NS, Malouff JM (2004) University student reading preferences in relation to the big five personality dimensions. Read Psychol 25(4):273–95
Simpson W (2001) QAP: the quadratic assignment procedure. In: North American STATA users’ group meeting
Takara Y (2018) Do cultural differences affect the trade of cultural goods? A study in trade of music. J Cult Econ 42(3):393–417
Thelwall M, Kousha K (2016) Goodreads: a social network site for book readers. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol 68(4):972–983
Weber EU, Hsee C (1998) Cross-cultural differences in risk perception, but cross-cultural similarities in attitudes towards perceived risk. Manag Sci 44(9):1205–1217
Xiao J, Gao W (2020) Connecting the dots: reader ratings, bibliographic data, and machine-learning algorithms for monograph selection. Ser Lib 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2020.1707599
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sabri, N., Sadeghian, S. & Bahrak, B. A cross-country study on cultural similarities based on book preferences. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 10, 86 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-020-00695-y
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-020-00695-y