What Are the Most Discussed Books on the Internet? According to Robots, Who Love to Read

Another great piece from Lit Hub.

Here’s the introduction

As a person who discusses books on the internet for a living, sometimes I have weird, random thoughts, like “what are the most discussed books on the internet?” And then, “how might I figure out which books are most discussed on the internet?” And then, “why don’t I Google it?” After that, I stop thinking and start Googling. In the end, in an attempt to answer my question, I Googled 275 different books in order to compare the total number of results, according to Google.

This number, by the way, is an estimate—a Google Webmaster described it as “a ballpark figure,” but it may be even less accurate than that. Even the estimate can vary a lot, based on a whole host of different factors, like where you are and what else you’ve searched for (in your whole entire life). But even if the numbers themselves are approximate, they may still have relative meaning, especially when accessed from the same computer, using the same browser, on the same day: at the very least, they should be able to tell us, in a general way, which books have been referenced more or less than others online.

It’s important to remember that this is not exactly the same as true popularity—plenty of bestsellers, especially older bestsellers, published when the internet was less of a driving force in book marketing, were relatively low-ranked here. Recent big-budget adaptations obviously help. So does drama. So does being ripe for academic inquiry. The fact that Rupi Kaur’s book is only in the middle of this list proves to me that Google does not do a good job of searching Instagram. Still, I admit that I was surprised by some of these—particularly by the relatively low ranking of some of the books that to me, in my corner of the internet, seem discussed to death. (My anecdote-based human brain wants to turn this into a case for these numbers being all completely meaningless, but it also wants to believe that I didn’t Google 275 books for nothing, so really, it’s a toss-up.)

A note on search strategies: my baseline technique was to search the author’s name and the book title together, both in quotes. I adjusted this a little if the title or name was very common; when relevant, I often omitted the article in a title to accommodate casual references (lots of times I tried this, it didn’t matter, but sometimes it did). That said, who knows what could be lurking in those millions of results? Another reason to think of these numbers in ballpark terms only.

What Are the Most Discussed Books on the Internet?