Not all books in the user profile are created equal: Measuring the preference “representativeness” of books in aNobii online bookshelves

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. The study proposes a novel construct of “representativeness” that aims to measure the degree to which a book in the user’s online bookshelf is able to represent his/her reading preference, based on the assumption that not all books are equally important when it comes to constructing individual users’ preference profiles. Thirty-five online bookshelf aNobii users were recruited, who were asked to perform a judgment task involving evaluating the degree of “representativeness” and “involvement” of 10 books self-selected from their bookshelves. The results show that there is a high correlation between “repre-sentativeness’ and “involvement”, a well-established construct in marketing. Book similarity networks for every participants was generated based on book co-ownership data extracted from aNobii. Two social network analytical (SNA) metrics: coreness and connectivity, were then applied to measure a book’s “representativeness” relative to the individual bookshelves. Results show that there were significant correlations between the SNA metrics and the user’s self-assessed “representativeness” and “involvement” of the books. Furthermore, it was found the correlations were stronger among bookshelves owned by users who have low reading diversity.