Segmenting and characterizing adopters of E-books and paper books based on Amazon book reviews

Lu Guan, Yafei Zhang , Jonathan Zhu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Online product reviews through which consumers express their opinions and experiences with products are extremely valuable for both potential buyers to make informed purchase decisions and retailers to improve their products/services and adjust existing marketing strategies. One of the key challenges for mining product reviews is how to obtain a “ground truth” to guide the segmentation of reviewers properly. We propose a behavior-to-opinion approach, in which users are first categorized based on some unambiguous behavioral patterns (if available) and their online reviews are then classified to reveal unique and detailed characteristics of each user category. In this paper, we identify four categories of book consumers (i.e., kindle-only, print-only, printto- kindle, and kindle-to-print) based on the long-term patterns of their review behavior. Their review posts are then clustered through word2vec and K-means, and four categories of adopters are matched with their concerned word topics. Finally, we find that print-only adopters show significantly different patterns on content-oriented topics as compared to other three groups. Kindle-to-print adopters pay more attention on portability whereas print-to-kindle adopters stress more on money and user experience. Taken together, our work indicates a diversity of characteristics among four categories of book reviewers.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSocial Media Processing
Subtitle of host publication5th National Conference, SMP 2016, Nanchang, China, October 29–30, 2016, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer 
Pages85-97
ISBN (Electronic)978-981-10-2993-6
ISBN (Print)978-981-10-2992-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2016
Event5th National Conference on Social Media Processing, SMP 2016 - Nanchang, China
Duration: 29 Oct 201630 Oct 2016

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
Volume669
ISSN (Print)1865-0929

Conference

Conference5th National Conference on Social Media Processing, SMP 2016
Country/TerritoryChina
CityNanchang
Period29/10/1630/10/16

Research Keywords

  • Behavioral patterns
  • E-books
  • Product reviews
  • Text analytics

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