A research about Books and authors connecting in the new world of globalization
Shvat Messica shvatm@post.bgu.ac.il and Itai Hay hayitai@post.bug.ac.il
Introduction
The world of literature has undergone a major transformation in recent years, with the uprising of new ways of communicating with authors via social media, new methods of reading such as e-readers and smartphones, with everything more accessible through the internet. Even libraries are becoming more obsolete for casual readers that can get their hands on books with monthly subscriptions.
The global transformation, called “globalization” by many experts, “can capture (...) the present ongoing large-scale growth of transplanetary (...) [and] connectivity” (Scholte, Jan Aart 2008, 1471-1502). With globalization affecting all aspects of life, we wished to look into the connection between authors and their backgrounds, their fans, and their books, to their success, both commercially and objectively by their book’s rating.
Using multiple datasets we gathered and combined we tackled said questions and tried, using multiple methods of visualization, to showcase the true nature of globalization, with graphs showcasing how authors from different countries influence each other, and how the author’s interaction with their fans can contribute to their commercial success.
Summary After dissecting, combining and analyzing our data, we gathered some interesting findings about books, authors and fans. Firstly, we did see that the time and location of publication has a major impact on a books’ popularity, with certain periods and locations outperforming others.
Another closer look was taken on an author’s gender and its relation to personal popularity with fans and commercial success. Globally, there’s a majority of male authors, who also generally have more fans than females. Some countries have more female authors, but even in those countries the male authors tend to have more fans than females, which can also be attributed to authors having a Twitter account and staying connected with their audience, which shows the true power of social media in today’s day and age.
Influence is a major topic in today’s closely related and connected world. We were able to show that there are central authors that are a major influence on others, both locally and globally. The United States is the central “exporter” of author influence with the largest amount of its authors influencing others from other countries, but it’s also the biggest “inner” influencer globally, where the most local authors derive inspiration from their local colleagues.
Next we tackled the question of “looking” at a book’s cover to predict an authors’ and books’ success and attributes. With an image similarity model we showed that certain genres have a similar book cover, which joins the perspective of connectivity between authors. To our surprise, we couldn’t see a connection between a book’s cover and its eventual success.
Finally we wanted to look into the progression of book publishing. While looking into the data we noticed a decline of book releases since 2011 after a year-to-year rise in the years before. Also, the rich time data allowed us to look into the popularity of book series. As a general observation, book series tend to decline in popularity after a few years of publishing. Should be thought about when planning a new book series.
We believe that our work can contribute to the understanding of authors and their books in the closely connected new world, with a lot of inside that can be gained when looking at certain aspects from different global perspectives.
For further research we believe that more data could create an even more precise look into our findings, to give a larger image of the world of book publishing in today's global world.