Communicatie door boekomslagen: het onderscheid naar genre
- Ronald Piers
Abstract
Product appearance is an important tool for providing information about the type of product. The same is true for the ‘packaging’ of fiction books. Informing about the type of book - the genre - is an important clue for the expected reading pleasure. Fiction books are complex products. The plot of a book, the type of story, it all has to be caught in one image. This article therefore explores whether covers of fictional works communicate a genre, whether subjects recognize such books accordingly and whether a cover is found typical of a genre. It is also explored whether a typicality judgment depends upon someone’s reading frequency or existing genre preferences. The results of a study among 32 subjects demonstrate that a cover informs about the book’s genre in most of the cases. There is also no difference between successful genre identification and the frequency of reading. Apart from successful genre identification, however, it turns out that there is a significant coherence between reading frequency and a typicality judgment. There is no significant effect of genre preferences on typicality.
How to Cite:
Piers, R., (2001) “Communicatie door boekomslagen: het onderscheid naar genre”, Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap 29(3), 209–222.
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