What Text Design Characterizes Book Genres?

Abstract

This study analyzes the relationship between non-verbal information (e.g., genres) and text design (e.g., font style, character color, etc.) through the classification of book genres using text design on book covers. Text images have both semantic information about the word itself and other information (non-semantic information or visual design), such as font style, character color, etc. When we read a word printed on some materials, we receive impressions or other information from both the word itself and the visual design. Basically, we can understand verbal information only from semantic information, i.e., the words themselves; however, we can consider that text design is helpful for understanding other additional information (i.e., non-verbal information), such as impressions, genre, etc. To investigate the effect of text design, we analyze text design using words printed on book covers and their genres in two scenarios. First, we attempted to understand the importance of visual design for determining the genre (i.e., non-verbal information) of books by analyzing the differences in the relationship between semantic information/visual design and genres. In the experiment, we found that semantic information is sufficient to determine the genre; however, text design is helpful in adding more discriminative features for book genres. Second, we investigated the effect of each text design on book genres. As a result, we found that each text design characterizes some book genres. For example, font style is useful to add more discriminative features for genres of ``Mystery, Thriller \& Suspense'' and ``Christian books \& Bibles.''