Popularity Chart on Series

LT's resident chart guru has added a new chart to the series page!

At the bottom of the main series page, there is now a chart that displays the number of copies of each work that were added over specified time periods. You can view only Core works or All works in a series and display the data by Year, Quarter, or Month.

How popular is your favorite series on LT?

Check out some cool looking charts!

A Court of Thorns and Roses


The Expanse


Rivers of London

Some I've found:

* The ascent of Elephant and Piggie https://www.librarything.com/nseries/2232/Elephant-and-Piggie
* The HUGE ascent of Bridgerton https://www.librarything.com/nseries/728/Bridgertons
* Dune is rising, but "Dune" itself is always dominant https://www.librarything.com/nseries/24/Dune
* I have no idea why For Dummies spikes every 3 years https://www.librarything.com/nseries/622/For-Dummies
* Calvin and Hobbes https://www.librarything.com/nseries/355/Calvin-and-Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes is something we've noticed. Certain books/authors/genres were cataloged a lot on LT early on, then declined. Note that it's NOT about numbers per se; the graphs are by percent. Other ones rise. I think it's a combination of changing demographics, changing tastes and the effect of members cataloging their back-collections early and then mostly new acquisitions. But it's interesting.

Note that this only takes non-deleted books into account.

I love Mo Willems' books, and Elephant and Piggie are outstanding.

(Pigeon is good for teaching that books are fun and for amusing everyone to death, but Elephant and Piggie run right across the boundary of actual reading.)

Cumulative graphs by actual numbers of copies might be interesting too.

Is the number for 2022 just for the year so far, or is it a pro-rata figure for the whole year? It's interesting that the three examples above have all gone up from 2021 to 2022 even though it's still less than half way through the year.

It’s percent of books added, so, yes, effectively prorated. It puts all years on the same footing. (But you can see the actual numbers as you mouse over it.)

This is fun!

Thanks.

I saw one before I saw this thread.

https://www.librarything.com/nseries/23091/Haikyu%21%21

Look how pretty those ribbony lines are!

>10 aspirit:

Ha. Looks like a winner that does!

Just dropping by to say I like it :)

Interesting. Harry Potter is a downward slope...

https://www.librarything.com/nseries/85872/mandelbaums-kleine-gourmandisen tends to get several new titles twice a year. (It's single ingredient cookbooks.)

>13 gilroy:

Not very surprising for a series that “everyone” already has.

I’m more curious why there was an uptick in ‘16?

>15 AndreasJ: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child publication date.

>13 gilroy:, >15 AndreasJ:, >16 MarthaJeanne:

The gimmick for Harry Potter was for the books to be issued on a schedule so that that the hero matured with the reading audience (with corresponding changes to the prose style and plot focus). The appeal of the series is therefore concentrated in a specific cohort.

>17 paradoxosalpha: That was my youngest son. Harry Potter turned him into a reader.

>3 timspalding:

Very interesting about both Dummies and Calvin & Hobbes. If that holds for Dummies, the Publisher would do well to understand that, for sure.

Dummies also raises the idea that having a collapsible section for the list of works would be useful, but I'm not sure how many series it would be so pronounced. That is a long list to scroll down before coming to the chart, if I wasn't looking for it specifically I never would have kept going.

Honestly, I think HP's longevity is the story.

* The first came out in 1997, the last in 2007, 15 years ago.
* So far in 2022 they occupy #1 and 7 of the 10 most cataloged books ( https://www.librarything.com/zeitgeist/popularity )
* In the US public-library data we collect, which comes from thousands of libraries, the first HP is at #15 for 2021. This despite there being so many used copies floating around that bookstores turn them away! If you add them all together, they'd be at #1. https://about.proquest.com/en/blog/2021/top-syndetics-unbound-titles-of-2021/

Thanks)

Ok, the For Dummies chart is really interesting ... Are we all on a 3-year cycle of "I could use a little help with this ..." we buy the book, we try it, it's OK, and we move on to something else and then realize we could use a little help, and ...

Ooh, nice. Off to explore a few graphs!

>22 benjclark:

Maybe there’s a cycle in how they publish or market the series?