Evaluation of a Method for Revising Colors of Book Cover Images to Reflect Reader Impressions

Abstract—The image on a digital book cover gives potential buyers not only an impression of the book's contents but also serves as an aid when searching and browsing before and after buying the book. I have developed a method for revising book cover images to reflect readers' impressions. I constructed a color database of the correspondence between colors and typical adjectives representing various inner emotional states and a feature database for target products. Using this database and extracting reader impressions from book reviews, I applied appropriate colors to book cover images to reflect reader impressions. I evaluated this method by performing three experiments, one with 42 participants to determine how this method could reflect reader impressions, one with 113 participants to determine how changing colors of book cover image changed the viewer’s impression of the book, and one with 7 design experts to determine how this method could help them simulate book cover design. The results revealed that some revised images better reflected the reader impressions than the original images, which might increase sales and give design experts new ideas for the book cover design.

Index Terms—Adjective, book cover image, book review, color psychology.

Tomoko Kajiyama is with the Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom (e-mail: tomoko.kajiyama@open.ac.uk).

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Cite: Tomoko Kajiyama, "Evaluation of a Method for Revising Colors of Book Cover Images to Reflect Reader Impressions," International Journal of Culture and History vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 31-35, 2018.