https://www.publicbooks.org/where-is-all-the-book-data/
"After the first lockdown in March 2020, I went looking for book sales data.
I’m a data scientist and a literary scholar, and I wanted to know what books
people were turning to in the early days of the pandemic for comfort,
distraction, hope, guidance. How many copies of Emily St. John Mandel’s
pandemic novel
Station Eleven were being sold in COVID-19 times compared to
when the novel debuted in 2014? And what about Giovanni Boccaccio’s much
older—14th-century—plague stories,
The Decameron? Were people clinging to or
fleeing from pandemic tales during peak coronavirus panic? You might think, as
I naively did, that a researcher would be able to find out exactly how many
copies of a book were sold in certain months or years. But you, like me, would
be wrong.
I went looking for book sales data, only to find that most of it is proprietary
and purposefully locked away. What I learned was that the single most
influential data in the publishing industry—which, every day, determines book
contracts and authors’ lives—is basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the
industry. And I learned that this is a big problem."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
