Blog information considered useful for book sales prediction

This paper presents a new method to find leading indicators of domestic book sales from conventional Blog information. Although Blog information is different from actual purchases, it will influence customer behaviors. They consider it would be useful for decision making of businesses and organizations. Main contributions of the paper are three fold: 1) As well as study on the US of an Internet bookstore, there is a correlation between book sales data and Blog information in Japan by discriminating judge of book with reference rate; 2) Some of the Blog information are effective to predict the lead-time between publishers and bookstores; and 3) Process is proposed to judge whether the information is valid as leading indicators.