Abstract: Picture books are a primary resource for children to learn about the world: various topics are covered and discussed, reflecting many aspects of children's lives and inspiring children's imaginations. However, preferences for and purchases of books featuring diverse topics vary from one market to the other, depending on societal and cultural distinctions. Changing concerns from different eras affect different themes that are discussed and welcomed at certain times. Changing gender of authorship may also affect thematic choices. To investigate differences across the Chinese and UK picture book markets, we applied topic modelling to analyze publishers' metadata of four thousand best-selling picture books on Dangdang and Waterstones (the largest online bookstores in China and the UK, respectively). Results suggest that the Chinese best-selling picture book market prefers more education-oriented themes, while the UK market supports entertainment and a broad range of topics. The two markets share topics including love, family, and friendship. Book topics also vary depending on author gender in our dataset, with men writing more often about informational topics, and fictional and emotional themes being more frequently written about by women. From a picture book market longitudinal perspective, themes of families, children's emotions, and folk tales are present throughout, and they have progressed to be core topics. This comparison of market contexts provides insight into different publishing ecosystems and how they intersect.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.