every year, more than a hundred thousand are new titles. Of the over 3 million books in print in the U.S. In 2015, about 2.7 billion books were sold, a number that has remained fairly consistent in the last few years. Consequently, book publishing is a huge industry in the U.S., with a revenue that is projected to reach nearly 44 billion U.S. Indeed, the average American reads 12 to 13 books per year, and how people select the reading has been of much interest for researchers for decades. The analysis of the bestseller characteristics and the discovery of the universal nature of sales patterns with its driving forces are crucial for our understanding of the book industry, and more generally, of how we as a society interact with cultural products.īooks remain an important part of our lives, reading being the favorite leisure activity for many individuals. This model not only reproduces the entire sales trajectory of a book but also predicts the total number of copies it will sell in its lifetime, based on its early sales numbers. Using this universality we introduce a statistical model to explain the time evolution of sales. Finally we find that there is a universal pattern to book sales. Additionally, there is no gender disparity among bestselling fiction authors but nonfiction, most bestsellers are written by male authors. Looking at patterns characterizing authors, we find that fiction writers are more productive than nonfiction writers, commonly achieving bestseller status with multiple books. General fiction and biographies make the list more often than any other genre books, and the higher a book’s initial place in the rankings, the longer the book stays on the list as well. We find that there are seasonal patterns to book sales with more books being sold during holidays, and even among bestsellers, fiction books sell more copies than nonfiction books. Here we bring a big data approach to book success by investigating the properties and sales trajectories of bestsellers. And once there, only a handful of authors can command the lists for more than a few weeks. Yet, while over 3 million books are published each year, very few are read widely and less than 500 make it to the New York Times bestseller lists. As such, books remain an important cultural product, consumed widely. Reading remains the preferred leisure activity for most individuals, continuing to offer a unique path to knowledge and learning.
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