Neural network can determine book's genre by looking at its cover

Are you looking to build out your library of Ero Guro Nansensu, Aspergers Realism, Bigfoot Erotica, and Flarf? It could get easier, thanks to a neural network developed by researchers at Kyushu University in Japan that looks at book covers and determines their genre.

From MIT Technology Review:

Their method is straightforward. Iwana and Uchida downloaded 137,788 unique book covers from Amazon.com along with the genre of book. There are 20 possible genres but where a book was listed in more than one category, the researchers used just the first.

Next, the pair used 80 percent of the data set to train a neural network to recognize the genre by looking at the cover image. Their neural network has four layers, each with up to 512 neurons, which together learn to recognize the correlation between cover design and genre. The pair used a further 10 percent of the dataset to validate the model and then tested the neural network on the final 10 percent to see how well it categorizes covers it has never seen.