Application of social network analysis to understand the book renting patterns and to strategize the business model for justbooks.com

Abstract

Just Books is a new generation book library chain that provides a unique reading experience to book lovers with a wide range of books for every type of readers; Toddlers to teens and Dabblers to Bookworms under a modern, vibrant ambience with effective use of technology. Unlike a traditional library that is centrally located and people come there to read a book, Just Books has distributed libraries/stores in multiple parts of the city. Their founding philosophy is Every reader a book and every book a reader and they have around 250,000 book titles. Although it is probably easier to find a book for every reader, a bigger challenge is to try and ensure that most books have some readership. Also, in order to operate effectively and efficiently they need to make sure that their subscribers have minimum waiting time for popular titles and optimize cost to procure just enough number of copies of popular titles. To achieve this, it will probably be useful to analyze the renting patterns and to develop a ranking matrix for the books. Just Books would be interested to try and make sure that popular titles are available in all the stores. And, that other titles are optimally distributed to make sure that the requests for the books are met locally instead of a remote branch. As part of this project, we would like to employ Social network analysis to analyze the renting behavior of people, which is likely to give good insights as book reading is primarily recommendation based and is very likely to exhibit the same properties as ego-network or whole network. We will try to analyze the mechanism to rank books by the frequency of renting and recommendations from readers through network analysis and data mining techniques. We will also try to find the association among the books for the same kind of reader and among the readers who read the same kind of books so that suitable recommendations can be provided on the go. Through this effort, we would like to suggest a few strategies that Just Books can perhaps adopt for better operational effectiveness and efficiencies.