Purpose

Initially, our study was intended to compare the relative page sizes of books printed by British and American publishers. Our intention was to determine which publisher would have longer books across a stratified sample of six different genres: adult classics, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and romance. However, upon collection of the data, we noted that nearly all of the publishers were based in New York. This not only precluded a comparison by publisher country, but also a West Coast vs. East Coast analysis. In addition, data collection for the adult classic books was precluded by the fact that many “classic” books do not have a unique publisher or page length by virtue of having several different editions. However, our data for the other five genres was statistically valid. Therefore, we decided to modify our study to a comparison of page lengths across the five different genres. Since we are dealing with more than two populations, we will use a chi-square test for independence of variables, treating page length as a categorical variable by assigning page lengths to discrete bins.