Nippan, Fujitsu bring AI-based book selection to bookstores in Japan

Nippon Shuppan Hanbai (Nippan) and Fujitsu will jointly develop the SeleBoo book selection service, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically select books from a pool of 600,000 books on sale in Japan to complement the unique characteristics of a bookstore.

SeleBoo was conceptualised to highlight bookstores against a backdrop of falling reading rates and the rising popularity of e-books. Nippan will suggest books to its affiliated bookstores across Japan based on criteria such as the store concept and target customers, helping retail locations attract customers through in-store promotions and events. Through this service, Nippan and Fujitsu aim to invigorate the publishing industry market, and create new business models by matching books with products and services in other industries, such as cafes and general merchandise stores.

The service uses the Marketing AI Container*, a big data analysis service using Fujitsu's AI technology to analyse open data such as DBpedia** and Lod4all*** in addition to Nippan's 3.5 million bibliographic items of information on books and magazines as well as sales information, from about 3,000 bookstores across Japan. The service then selects books to create a list based on the bookstore or retail store's theme and target customer base.

Source: Fujitsu. Schematic of the SeleBoo book selection service.

By incorporating feedback from bookstore staff on the selection results, the AI can improve its book selection capability. The service will initially select books by keywords on a theme; if they are related to a theme; or by geographical relevance.

Fujitsu and Nippan plan to further enhance the service going forward, developing functionality such selecting books that suit the characteristics of a bookstore, and books selected by their covers. The service will begin making suggestions in the summer of 2018 (Q2-Q3).

*Marketing AI Container: an analysis environment that can execute as-is the advanced analysis logic developed by Fujitsu on the basis of over 200 analysis projects aimed at specific data usage goals for each individual company. The container can provide an analysis environment in a flexible form that fits the customer's needs.
 
**DBpedia: a community site that extracts information from Wikipedia and publishes it as linked open data (LOD).
 
***Lod4all: a LOD usage platform that aggregates LOD published around the world, and enables unified searches.