Content, Physical Appearance, Copy Condition - Tagging Customer Book Reviews

Abstract

Users of online bookstores are not interested only in general book description when searching and buying books, but also in subjective reader opinion, which could be found in online reviews. Reviewers usually comment on book content, but may also mention other aspects of the received book, such as binding, illustrations, translation etc. Meanwhile buyers are not always interested in the same aspect of a book, especially when they need it for a special purpose. Currently, obtaining non-content book information from reviews is difficult, therefore it would be reasonable to rethink their presentation and organization. In our study, we used an interview and a task solving method to determine whether social tagging could be an appropriate aid for this purpose. The results show that free tagging offers insight into users’ vocabulary but is not optimal for online review presentation. Nevertheless, it represents a good basis for creation of categories that describe books on different levels of abstraction and could be used as a filtering tool, which would select only those reviews containing the aspects of a book a buyer is interested in.