Books Whose Popularity Ranking On LT Suprises

For me it's...

One Hundred Years of Solitude - at #29
The Stranger - #51
The Road - #57
The Silmarillion - #70

...just for starters.

And you?

The topic title should be "Books Whose Popularity Ranking On LT Suprises YOU", BTW.

If you are going to be picky #2, it would be "surprises" :)

Sorry, couldn't resist.

--Kim (Former English Teacher)

It would be more interesting if you told us why the rankings surprise you.

These surprise you because they are too high or because they are too low? Or because they are somewhere in the list compared to any other particular books?

I just saw one - the most popular book I own is Pride and Prejudice, with 39,000+ copies (not surprising). The _second_ most popular book I own is The Kite-Runner, with 30,000+ copies - that one really surprised me! Jane Eyre is next and so on - a bunch of classics, for various definitions of classic. The Kite-Runner is very young to be in that company!

I don't think there's anything very surprising: the headline popularity figure is just ranking by cumulative number of copies. That doesn't say anything about why the book is in your library or how much value you attach to it. A much treasured copy of P&P that you've re-read faithfully once a year since you were 14 counts exactly the same as a pristine Silmarillion with the bookmark stuck permanently at page 5 or a Kite-Runner that you bought at the airport last year and haven't got around to putting in the charity bag yet.

What I find the most surprising is LT's diversity. The winner-takes-all effect is much less pronounced at LT than at Goodreads. The five titles below account for 1,9% of total titles at GR (160 m. logged) but only 0,3% at LT (64,3 m. logged):

Title : GR copies / LT copies / GR % / LT %
Harry Potter 1 : 755.404 / 61.918 /0,47% / 0,096%
Da Vinci Code : 713.269 / 43.013 / 0,45% / 0,067%
Twilight 1 : 693.757 / 34.447 / 0,43% / 0,054%
Kite Runner : 530.932 / 30.902 / 0,33% / 0,048%
Jane Eyre : 382.428 / 28.120 / 0,24% / 0,044%

7: Assuming you remove Kite Runner from LT when you put it in the charity bag and don't leave it there as a reminder not to do silly things like that again. (I haven't read Kite Runner, so it's not a comment on that particular book. It's just that I've bought lots of best sellers on a whim and regretted it after 20 pages.)

8: That is a very interesting set of statistics.

Oh, dear. I just found this

http://www.librarything.com/work/10532054

which is number 28 in popularity.

I am surprised they haven't been able to fix this bug yet!

What I find the most surprising is LT's diversity. The winner-takes-all effect is much less pronounced at LT than at Goodreads. The five titles below account for 1,9% of total titles at GR (160 m. logged) but only 0,3% at LT (64,3 m. logged)

We have smarter, wider-read people. It's as simple as that.

We have smarter, wider-read people. It's as simple as that.

And yet, are also more accepting of other people's taste in books.

> 11

Despite some of the anti-"collector" rhetoric I've occasionally encountered, the fact that LT is set up to facilitate detailed cataloging rather than just logging reading and networking about books is what drives the "smarter, wider-read" demographic. People who own enough books (and care about them sufficiently) to want a way to maintain a catalog are likely to be smarter and more widely read. I read results from a study a few years back that said that the best indicator for childhood literacy--far outclassing family wealth or formal schooling--was simply the number of books in the home.

Right. Even if they aren't, a system set up to catalog is going to get people to catalog their whole libraries. A fair number of people use both systems--LT to catalog everything, GR to record what they're reading now.

I wonder what happens to popularity numbers if you exclude books that members add in their first X months on LT. Would that give a better picture of the new books people are adding to their libraries? Or do we all take so long to enter our back-catalogues that the distinction is meaningless?

Definitely #17, "Please edit the title and author of your copy of this book to escape the book-eating black hole. Retain this notice on the black hole work to warn other travelers."

While I believe the bug that causes new copies of this (i.e. books with no title and no author) to be generated has been fixed, at least in the most common circumstances, it's been there for years, and really should be suppressed from the Zeitgeist even if the "user data is sacred" principle applies even in the case where there is no data present (so that the work itself can't be made to go away).

I'm glad that the book-eating black hole is not even more popular than it is!

I am somewhat surprised at The Silmarillion's popularity. Even though it's been dropping consistently since 2005, a 34-year-old companion text being the 215th most-catalogued book this month is fairly impressive.

>18 saltmanz:

There are a couple of factors at play, I think:

Current popularity; cumulative past popularity; a book's throw-out-ability.

I think the Silmarilion wins on 3; people don't throw it out. If past sales weren't affected by the throw-out factor I suspect books like Shogun (768) and Red Storm Rising (1,034) would above the Silmarilion.

>17 paradoxosalpha:

I've removed a few such books manually. I'm also removing non-spam works which are nevertheless peculiar, like when someone entered a whole bunch of books with basically the same title. It's really counting copies, not members. So one member entering 60 volumes of the same encyclopedia through a text import can rank in the top 1,000 for a month.

>19 timspalding: But can't you manually remove the whole black hole work from the zeitgeist list of top books?

book's throw-out-ability

This is partially why I'd like statistics about what people are actually reading, not just what they have in their catalogues.

Fascinating stuff, folks. Thanks to everyone for posting. :)

>3 Keeline:

Doesn't there need to be a noun or a pronoun at the end of the sentence? Otherwise, you're not answering the question, "WHOM does this suprise?"

Art (BA in English) ;)

>4 jjwilson61:

Briefly:

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Just because it seems like it would be a difficult book (then again, I haven't read it, so I could be mistaken).

The Stranger: Because I didn't think there would be much of an audience for an existentialist novel written by a Nobel
laureate (then again, Dubya apparently read it, so anything's possible (sorry, Republicans)).

The Road: Because it's such a violent and disturbing work - again not something that I would think would have a large audience.

The Silmarillion: Because, as #7 indicates, the beginning is such a chore to get through. (Then again, as they also point out, popularity is merely an expression of # of copies owned, not the books that everyone has necessarily read in their entirety).

>5 AnnieMod:

Hopefully that answered your question as well. :)

>6 jjmcgaffey:

Yeah, The Kite-Runner's popularity suprised me, too. I know it was a best-seller, but it's more popular than The Lord of the Rings? Wow.

#21: The Kite-Runner is not more popular than the Lord of the Rings; there's some 20,000 copies of each of the individual books of the Lord of the Rings in LT, so presumably there's somewhere around 47,000 copies of the complete trilogy, not just the 27,000 cataloged as one volume. Looking at it that way, it beats everything but the Harry Potter books, which hold spots 1-7.

>22 prosfilaes:

Good point. Hadn't thought of it that way.

> 22

Yes. I yearn for more thorough LT exploitation of "contains" relationship data. It's gotten to the point where a significant portion of the recommendations I receive are for books that I already own--either omnibuses that I have in the individual volumes, or separately-published works that I have in collected editions.

>21 artturnerjr:

I've recently read One Hundred Years of Solitude. I don't go for 'literature' much and it wasn't a five-star work for me, but the ranking is no surprise at all to me.

As for your response to message 3 - 2 'r's.

"As for your response to message 3 - 2 'r's."

Oh, boy - I feel like an idiot. (I made the same error repeatedly, too.) :/

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the classic literary work of Latin American magical realism. It was also included as an Oprah's Book Club selection in 2004, the year before LT went online.

#2, 21, 26

To answer the question about the verb: Yes, it needs a noun or a pronoun object. 'Surprise' is a transitive verb; they always take one. ^-^

And since I can't resist being nitpicky myself: books is plural so it should be 'surprise'.

(Sorry. I'm doomed to nitpickiness for good or ill.)

>27 eromsted:

It's a common read in high-schools now too, isn't it?

I've actually read the Silmarillion. It wasn't bad...though I suspect I'm remembering the 'good parts' as the whole. But I don't have it (physically or cataloged) - must have gotten rid of it at some point (or I read my parents' copy rather than owning it).

15> Dunno. I entered most of my books in two or three months, but the ones that I'd already owned that got entered after that were the ones that were in boxes in storage - the ones I didn't really want to read. So that sort of thing would skew stuff. I also buy in bunches, from library book sales and the like, enter them and then possibly get around to reading them sometime in the next year or two...so ignoring my first couple months wouldn't really show "new books I actually want to read" very well at all.

>30 jjmcgaffey: I've read it, too, & thought it was excellent. I just think it throws people who pick it up expecting Lord of the Rings II, which it isn't. Consequently, I've known a lot of people who've picked it up, started it, haven't been able to get past page 50 or so, and have more or less permanently placed it on their "to be read... someday" shelves.

31>

(Referring to The Silmarillion)

Consequently, I've known a lot of people who've picked it up, started it, haven't been able to get past page 50 or so, and have more or less permanently placed it on their "to be read... someday" shelves.

It is, in fact, one of the most-unread books on LT:

http://www.librarything.com/tag/unread

So, for that matter, is One Hundred Years of Solitude. That whole list is packed with "Yeah, I'll read this....sometime" type of books.

>32 lorax:

So's The Kite-Runner. :)

"Unread" is a great tag; I'm fascinated with books that people own & haven't read, for some reason.

http://www.librarything.com/tag/TBR is not less fascinating. Or http://www.librarything.com/tag/to+read :)

@33: Apparently, I am also fascinated by books that I own but haven't read. It's the only explanation for why I've got so dang many of them. ;)

Don't we all :)

One Hundred Years of Solitude was required reading for me in high school.

Uh oh... what's that saying about what the road to hell is paved with? :D

38> Oooh. The (booklover's) torture of Tantalus - standing in the middle of stacks of books, but they recede from your hands whenever you reach for them...

>34 AnnieMod:

Did anyone who purchased Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell actually read it? :D

> 40

I did! I liked it, too.

@41: Ditto. I need to read it again sometime, too.

>40 artturnerjr:
Yes. And I loved it.

I suspect a lot of these are actually wishlist copies as opposed to people having it. Or they bought it when it was getting awards... and then got scared from the size or the language or the footnotes or whatever.

>41 paradoxosalpha:

Interesting. Sounds a little bit like Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, which I liked a lot.

>43 AnnieMod:

I think another thing that may factor in is that people sometimes purchase longish books that they want to read but don't think they can complete before they are due back at the library - that's something I often do, anyway.

>44 artturnerjr:

That's possible. Not much experience with libraries in the last 15 years so my usual habits are not influenced by them and I keep forgetting that people's are). But it is also a bit non-standard - both for the ST/Fantasy fandom and for the straight historical readers so I suspect in some cases people did not expect exactly what it was.

If you had never read it and if you generally read that type of literature, I would encourage you to try it (and don't skip the footnotes - sometimes the story there is making half of the charm of the chapter). And then pickup the short stories collection that kinda explains some things which are just mentioned in the novel. It's one of those love-or-hate books.

Now... I feel like rereading the whole things. :)

>45 AnnieMod:

I think I will have to at least sample it. I'm a bit overdue for a really massive novel - maybe that'll be my next one.

It'd be interesting to run some analysis of the data to figure out where we're seeing, say, an Oprah-effect or award-effect (e.g. The Road, which got recognition from Oprah and the Pulitzer in quick succession, then from Hollywood not long after).

>32 lorax:-34
Since it's raining, I used my lunch-break to have an unscientific go at the data for the various "unread" tags to see what the effect is if you normalise unread tags for the total number of copies.
Out of the books that appear in the top 30 for one of the three tags ("TBR", "To read" and "unread"), the top scorers on the Susanna scale of unreadability(*) are:

1. Vanity Fair : 1.22 Susannas
2. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell : 1.00 Susannas (by definition)
3. Possession and The blind assassin : tied in third place with a score of 0.90 Susannas
5. War and Peace : 0.84 Susannas
6. Anna Karenina : 0.80 Susannas
7. Ulysses : 0.79 Susannas
8. Don Quixote : 0.76 Susannas
9. The thirteenth tale : 0.72 Susannas
10. The Historian : 0.70 Susannas

Vanity Fair has about half as many copies on LT as Jonathan Strange.
The Silmarilion, surprisingly, is down in 25th place with 0.54 Susannas, on level-pegging with Moby-Dick and Atonement. One hundred years of solitude scores 0.57 Susannas, putting it in 20th place, between Guns, germs and steel and Gödel, Escher, Bach.

A brief history of time, a notoriously unread book, only scores 0.38 Susannas, and doesn't appear in the top 30 list for any of the three tags. That perhaps suggests that people only bother with tagging books as "unread" if they've bought them recently.

If you want to see the full data, it's on Google Docs.

Of course, this is very unscientific, because you would soon get down to books with only one or two copies that were all tagged "unread". Even in the "top 30" there's a rogue outlier with 77 copies in a private library, all tagged "to read".

(*) 1 Susanna = ("TBR" + "To read" + "unread")/(No. of copies) /0.0284

I'm apparently weirder than I thought. Of the ten books you've listed, I've read 9 and liked them all except Ulysses. (Oh and haven't read the blind assassin either.)

I don't mark my books unread, altho I have plenty that fit that category. I wonder how many folks do?

My recent unreads are either in To Read or Wishlist ( which for me means books someone has mentioned that sound interesting that I might or might not ever buy or read).

I have a To Read collection, but I don't tag books "to read" (or analogs). Based on the names of the default collections, majkia and I are probably not unusual in using collections for this purpose.

Oddly, the only ranking "unreadable" book that I have read is the Clarke, and none of the others (either in the list at #48 or in the top ten of "Most often tagged unread") are in my "To read" collection, or in my catalog at all.

>49 majkia:,50
Yes, to do this properly, one should take collections into account. The "unread" tags may well be weighted towards books tagged before collections were introduced, which could explain why there is a fairly high proportion of classics in between the recent bestsellers. It's also worth emphasising that only a tiny proportion of readers tag their books this way: one Susanna is only 2.8%.

>48 thorold:

Wonderful stuff. You definitely made me smile.

Of the books you mentioned, the only ones I've read are The Silmarillion and Moby-Dick (I've given Ulysses a shot a couple of times but have never been able to complete it).

I'm a little surprised (correct spelling, yes?) to see The Blind Assassin ranked so high here - I've read Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and thought it was a breeze, basically; I'm guessing The Blind Assassin is considerablly more difficult. Also slightly surprised to not see any William Faulkner here - he strikes me as the epitome of someone whose books get purchased with the best of intentions, only to end up gathering dust on shelf (then again, I often meet people who've read The Sound and the Fury, so who knows?).

For the record, I use "unread" and "unfinished" tags, as well as the tag "tbr 2011" for books that I'm specifically planning on reading this year. I also have most of my unread books in a "To Read" collection.

>52 artturnerjr:
Hmm: I bought the LoA Faulkners a good many years ago, but have only read a couple of the novels in them. But The sound and the fury only scores 0.67 Susannas, As I lay dying 0.52, with similar numbers of copies to Vanity Fair - neither of them is in the top thirty lists for the three tags. Maybe non-readers of Faulkner are less honest than non-readers of Victorian classics or recent bestsellers?
It is interesting that the only "American classic" that appears in the lists is Moby-Dick - no sign of Henry James, Hawthorne, Hemingway, or Scott Fitzgerald. For some reason it's apparently OK not to have read dead English or Russian authors, but not American ones...

It'd be interesting to compile data indicating whether people are more likely to read books by authors of the same nationality as themselves, but as LTers often don't included this information, it'd be difficult to figure with any kind of accuracy.

I noticed that most of the top 100 books are fiction. Does this mean that there are fewer fiction titles, so people who like fiction end up reading the same books, or that fiction is just more popular? All of my books, (95% non fiction), are outside the top100.

Yeah, I'm slightly surprised by the dearth of popular non-fiction titles on LT. I think it would be cool if you could go to the Zeitgeist page and pull up all the most popular non-fiction books, but I am loath to ask Tim about this as it seems he has so much on his plate already. :/

You could bring up the non-fiction tag page, http://www.librarything.com/tag/non-fiction, and it gives you a list of books in popularity order.

I thought that just ranked the books by the number of times they had been tagged w/ that particular tag, not necessarily by popularity (i.e., total number of copies on LT).

59> I think your right. Maybe there should be more sorting options on the tag page.

>59 artturnerjr:

Here are the non-fiction(?) titles I've been able to pick out of the overall LT top 200 in terms of copies owned:

83. Freakonomics
100. Guns, Germs, and Steel
108. Angela's Ashes
114. The Tipping Point
119. Eat, Pray, Love
121. A Short History of Nearly Everything
122. The Prince
124. Blink
139. The Diary of Anne Frank
142. Mere Christianity
146. In Cold Blood??
151. The Elements of Style
172. Tuesday's with Morrie
178. A Brief History of Time
186. The Glass Castle
189. Running with Scissors
192. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
193. The Devil in the White City
199. The Republic

Thanks, cpg. :)

There's probably more "non-fiction" than "fiction" in my library, but I deliberately refrain from using those categories in my shelving and cataloging.

Non-fiction is much more specialised than fiction. I have books about metallurgy, railway signalling, post-colonial literature, Dutch long-distance footpaths, surveying techniques for colonial administrators, recumbent bicycles, obsolete programming languages, and dozens of other fascinating topics that aren't likely to interest more than a tiny handful of people. Many of them don't even interest me any more, come to think of it...
I'm not at all surprised that the list in Post 61 is basically all best-selling memoirs (marketed and read like fiction) with a thin scattering of recent popular science and a couple of school classics. Where else are we going to overlap with each other in any numbers? Even if we all own a phone book and a road atlas, for instance, we'll probably have different ones according to where in the world we live and how old we are. And who bothers to catalogue phone books anyway?

> 65

You wrote:

"I'm not at all surprised that the list in Post 61 is basically all best-selling memoirs (marketed and read like fiction) with a thin scattering of recent popular science and a couple of school classics."

So we're basically united intellectually by what's popular, what's marketed to us, and what our teachers told us to read. How frightening.

#28, @Shanra: "'Surprise' is a transitive verb"

Merriam-Webster:
intransitive verb
: to cause astonishment or surprise <her success didn't surprise>

>67 jimroberts:
I think the transitive use of "surprise" is more normal: I rarely hear or see the usage you cite, @jimroberts.

#68, @AnnaClaire: "I think the transitive use of 'surprise' is more normal"

More common, certainly. The intransitive use didn't bother me, but I thought that might be a quirk of British English, which is why I looked to see what the editors of M-W think.

The most widely-held books are either massively popular series (Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings) or required reading in school. (Plus Dan Brown.)

The latter category includes some titles that surprised me, such as Life of Pi, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Kite Runner, and American Gods. (My kids told me about the first three, and Gaiman himself talks about the last.) The Stranger and The Little Prince are high school French texts.

The first book I see which definitely falls outside of those two categories is probably The Time Traveler's Wife.

It's possible that the LibraryThing membership is almost by definition biased towards series: people who follow series have more books, and a greater motivation to keep their books organized. Maybe.