Judging Books by Their Cover: A quantitative study on how media consumption influences purchase decision for culturally acclaimed books

Abstract: This thesis investigates book readers and factors that affect their purchase intention towards physical books with different attributes. Books have a vast variety which makes them attractive to a lot of different personalities. Considering this, the formulated research question is: Does an individual's preferences for media consumption influence their purchase intention for differently culturally acclaimed books? The authors aim to fill this research gap by performing a quantitative study using surveys, targeting different kinds of book readers. The results show that people who read more are more likely to buy more intellectually challenging books like a Nobel prize winning book. Adding to that, people who spend more time watching TV series and movies are more likely to buy a book that has a visual adaptation on Netflix, for example. Moreover, the authors investigate the role gender plays in purchase intention and find that females are more likely to buy the Nobel prize winning book. One of the few implications for future research in this study is to investigate the different book prizes' effect on purchase intention.