A cross-country study on cultural similarities based on book preferences

What people choose to read is believed to be highly influenced by their cultural backgrounds and environment. Thus, understanding the cultural and socioeconomic factors that have significant relations with the reading preferences of nations can be of great importance for the book retail industry. These insights can have applications in recommender systems, sales predictions, and customer relationship management. Motivated by these values, we conducted a large-scale cross-country analysis of cultural similarities and differences based on book preferences using data collected from Goodreads. We use bipartite configuration model and community detection to explore the relationships between countries based on their book preferences. We also investigate the similarities between countries based on their favorite genres and authors. Additionally, this paper explores the significance of cultural, lingual, and socioeconomics factors on book preferences using quadratic assignment procedure statistical tests. Our results indicate that geographical distance, lingual distance, cognitive ability, intelligence quotient, and individualism are all significantly associated with book preference at the country level.