Amazon Analysis

Amazon Books Covers Iconography: Collective Consciousness

Introduction

Amazon has been also useful for the book covers analysis. Which is the most used language?
Which are the main themes on the covers? To answer this questions we analysed from a visual point of view the 99 book covers found from the two queries. 83 covers have been considered for Internet Addiction (green) and only 16 for Digital Addiction. The ones not considered are signed in red (see the image below).


How to read the visualization

The visualisation is composed by a rectangle-module grid, where each module represents a book. The colour tags the topic of the cover image: yellow for devices and technology, blue for neutral themes not linkable to any of the other categories, red for drugs and other addiction, purple for families and religion, green for medicine and black are the books whose covers could not be found. The rectangle-modules can be rotated on mouse hover to see the corresponding original cover underneath.

How it has been done

The visualisation has been realised by substituting each cover with the colour of the corresponding tag using illustrator. Once exported the .svg the visualisation has been animated and embedded in the website.

Findings

Most of the covers show images referring to technology or neutral topics. Only a small part refers to the Addiction or dares comparisons with drugs. We can easily affirm that the book iconography tends to hide the problem in order to result more neutral and didactic. Interesting is the presence of covers related to the family and religion sphere, even though in small quantity.

Metadata

Timestamp: 20/11/2014 - 15/12/2014

Data source: Amazon

Related Protocol

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