A Library Demand List

February 20, 2022

This tableThe table below takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and adds a bit of infor­ma­tion for each title reflecting the demand for its e-book edition at a collec­tion of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.

Here's how it works. I take the fifteen current NYT Best Sellers and “re-rank” them according to:

the number of holds, to get a sense of the relative number of patrons waiting for each e-book.

the number of copies owned, to get a sense of which e-books libraries have purchased/licensed in great quantity. These tend to be books that have lingered on the list and/or were well-promoted ahead of time.

the ratio of holds to copies owned, to get a sense of not just which books are popular, but which are “more popular than expected”; think accel­er­a­tion instead of velocity. These tend, conversely, to be newer books and/or surprise hits. (This is my favorite ranking.)

In the table, for each book, I give you a sense of how widely those new library ranks diverge from its NYT rank. A book at the top of the NYT list but with (relatively) low demand at these public libraries will be coded with red arrows; a book low on the list that is hotly demanded will be solid green.

A dash (-) indicates no diver­gence in rank. A typo­graph­ical dagger (†) indicates that no library holds any copies of the e-book.

Read more details.

I don’t display the raw number of e-book holds because this isn’t a full accounting of all U.S. public libraries (I wish!) so the numbers have meaning only in compar­ison to each other, not as free-floating measurements.

And, I'll repeat this, because it's important: the library ranks are calcu­lated within the current NYT list, not among like, all library e-books. I do not currently have a way to survey all library e-books 😉

One more wrinkle! Sometimes, when a book is very popular, libraries will purchase a “cost-per-circulation” license, which means they can pay for loans to patrons on demand and, as a result, those books at those libraries will have zero holds; you ask for the e-book, you get it. This muddles my rankings a bit! Unfortunately, I have no way to determine how e-books are being licensed at different libraries, and this murkiness is one of the reasons I wanted to keep these re-rankings very “high level”—directional indications, not exact accountings.

I think these views of the NYT list are inter­esting because library e-book lending has exploded in the past few years, and now consi­tutes a very important channel for reading in the United States. It feels worth­while to try to under­stand how its patterns both mirror and diverge from book buying.

I am being cryptic about where this data comes from, for Secret Reasons, but/and I think this is compat­ible with my desire to show the broad gist. The NYT list is gist-y, after all — not a raw tally of books sold, but a deeper divination of commercial momentum.

If you’re not familiar with the supply side of the library e-book equation, it’s worth reading Dan Cohen’s post outlining the myriad acqui­si­tion models for these weird entities. It’s … a lot!

Project scope: This is intended as a sketch, and I consider it finished. I’ll keep this page in sync with the NYT list for at least one year, until February 2022.

Update: It's February 2022, so I will no longer be updating this sketch. Thanks for checking in!

Thanks for viewing!

Robin

NYT   Holds Owned Ratio
1 IT ENDS WITH US
Colleen Hoover (Atria)
⬇︎ ⬇︎⬇︎ ⬇︎
2 VERITY
Colleen Hoover (Grand Central)
⬇︎⬇︎ ⬇︎⬇︎ ⬇︎
3 THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO
Taylor Jenkins Reid (Washington Square/Atria)
⬆︎ ⬇︎ ⬇︎
4 UGLY LOVE
Colleen Hoover (Atria)
⬇︎⬇︎ ⬇︎⬇︎ ⬆︎
5 THE MAID
Nita Prose (Ballantine)
⬇︎ ⬇︎ -
6 THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY
Amor Towles (Viking)
⬆︎ ⬆︎ ⬇︎
7 THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY
Matt Haig (Viking)
⬆︎ ⬆︎ ⬇︎
8 BLACK CAKE
Charmaine Wilkerson (Ballantine)
⬇︎⬇︎ ⬇︎⬇︎ ⬆︎⬆︎
9 THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS
Ali Hazelwood (Berkley)
⬆︎ ⬆︎ ⬆︎
10 THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME
Laura Dave (Simon & Schuster)
⬆︎ ⬆︎⬆︎ ⬇︎
11 THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR
Nina de Gramont (St. Martin’s)
⬇︎ ⬇︎ ⬆︎
12 THE JUDGE'S LIST
John Grisham (Doubleday)
⬆︎ ⬆︎⬆︎ ⬇︎
13 PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION
Emily Henry (Berkley)
⬆︎ ⬆︎⬆︎⬆︎ ⬇︎
14 WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING
Delia Owens (Putnam)
⬆︎ ⬆︎ ⬆︎
15 ONE STEP TOO FAR
Lisa Gardner (Dutton)
⬆︎ ⬆︎ ⬆︎⬆︎