Given below is the extract of a news story in National Post, Dec 16, 2005, appeared with a headline: Yes, You Can Judge a Book by its Title -- Program 70% Accurate," by Misty Harris. Also, published as "Anyone who says you can't judge a book by its cover isn't trying hard enough" in Windsor Star:
A British statistician has developed a complex computer model able to calculate a book's likelihood of being a bestseller based solely on its title.
In a study released Thursday, Atai Winkler reports his new program is able to accurately forecast the strength of a book's sales nearly 70 per cent of the time -- about 40 per cent better than random guesswork.
After analysing 11 variables, from the number of words in the title to the entomology of the words used, three key "differentiators" were found between bestsellers and non-bestsellers.
"It usually becomes a gut-instinct kind of thing where the title rolls off the tongue well or sounds good to the ear," says Sellers. "I'd say that's as scientific as it gets."
Related research on this area includes:
..Language Log: Judging a Book by Its Cover
..More at Google
..SEE ALSO Quantification Titles @ Amazon from my Listmania (Informetrics, quantitative, bibliometric, webometric, etc.)
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About Misty Harris
Additional Reference:
Zipf, Power-law, Pareto - a ranking tutorial, by Lada A. Adamic
Many man made and naturally occurring phenomena, including city sizes, incomes, word frequencies, and earthquake magnitudes, are distributed according to a power-law distribution. A power-law implies that small occurrences are extremely common, whereas large instances are extremely rare. This regularity or 'law' is sometimes also referred to as Zipf and sometimes Pareto. continued ...
More about Zipf's law
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