Genre Categorization and its Effect on Preference for Fiction Books

Abstract

In the domain of cultural products, sets of products categorized together on the basis of perceived similarities constitute a genre. When studying the process of genre categorization, any item can be viewed as the prototype of a genre plus a list of variations. The more an item resembles the prototype, the more this item is viewed as typical of the genre. The present study focuses on the extent to which the categorization of a fiction book cover by genre helps to single out the most preferred book. It is hypothesized that the typicality of a specific genre, identified by a book's front cover, affects the preference for that book. In an experimental setting, frequent and infrequent readers (N = 32) were asked to judge the typicality and to state their preference for thirteen book covers from two different genres (literature and mystery). The results show that 77 percent of all covers were classified correctly as to genre. Furthermore, the more representative a book was for a particular genre, the greater the preference for the book.

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