The Top 100 Books on Facebook

The Facebook Data Science Team curled up with some good books, analyzing more than 130,000 status updates containing the phrases “10 books” or “ten books,” during the last two weeks of August, playing off a meme that has been active for about one year: “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes, and don't think too hard. They do not have to be the 'right' books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way." So, which book finished at No. 1? Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel explained how they determined the top 100 books on the social network in a note on the Facebook Data Science page: To answer this question, we gathered a de-identified sample of over 130,000 status updates matching “10 books” or “ten books” appearing in the last two weeks of August 2014 (although the meme has been active over at least a year). The demographics of those posting were as follows: 63.7 percent were in the U.S., followed by 9.3 percent in India and 6.3 percent in the U.K. Women outnumbered men 3.1:1. The average age was 37. We therefore expect the books chosen to be reflective of this subset of the population. We programmatically segmented the posts into lists and found the most frequently occurring substrings, which corresponded to different books, e.g. “Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.” However, the same book could appear as different substrings: e.g. just “Anna Karenina” or “Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy”. We clustered similar variants programmatically, hand tuning where the algorithm had failed to merge two popular variants. We then used the clusters to automatically match the book lists against the common variants of the top 500 most popular books. Without further ado, here are Facebook’s top 100 books, including their authors and the percentage of status updates they appeared in: Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, 21.08 percent To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 14.48 percent The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien, 13.86 percent The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien, 7.48 percent Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 7.28 percent The Holy Bible, 7.21 percent The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, 5.97 percent The Hunger Games Trilogy, Suzanne Collins, 5.82 percent The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, 5.70 percent The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, 5.63 percent The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 5.61 percent 1984, George Orwell, 5.37 percent Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, 5.26 percent Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, 5.23 percent The Stand, Stephen King, 5.11 percent Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, 4.95 percent A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle, 4.38 percent The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, 4.27 percent The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis, 4.05 percent The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho, 4.01 percent Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery, 3.95 percent The Giver, Lois Lowry, 3.88 percent The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, 3.67 percent Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card, 3.53 percent The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, 3.39 percent Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 3.38 percent The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan, 3.38 percent The Book Thief, Markus Zusak, 3.32 percent Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 3.26 percent Hamlet, William Shakespeare, 3.22 percent The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 3.21 percent Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, 3.15 percent Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, 3.15 percent Animal Farm, George Orwell, 3.12 percent The Book of Mormon, 3.08 percent The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank, 3.05 percent Dune, Frank Herbert, 3.02 percent One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2.98 percent The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 2.83 percent Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, 2.78 percent The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein, 2.72 percent The Fault in Our Stars, John Green, 2.68 percent On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 2.68 percent Lamb, Christopher Moore, 2.58 percent Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 2.54 percent A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving, 2.53 percent Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, 2.52 percent The Help, Kathryn Stockett, 2.45 percent The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, 2.44 percent American Gods, Neil Gaiman, 2.42 percent Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls, 2.41 percent Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein, 2.39 percent The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, 2.38 percent Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder, 2.35 percent The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, 2.31 percent Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett, 2.31 percent The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, 2.29 percent Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 2.24 percent A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, 2.21 percent Les Miserables, Victor Hugo, 2.21 percent Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 2.16 percent Night, Elie Wiesel, 2.12 percent The Dark Tower Series, Stephen King, 2.12 percent Outlander, Diana Gabaldon, 2.07 percent The Color Purple, Alice Walker, 1.92 percent A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini, 1.89 percent The Art of War, Sun Tzu, 1.88 percent Catch 22, Joseph Heller, 1.85 percent The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, 1.85 percent The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky, 1.83 percent The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway, 1.78 percent Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden, 1.76 percent Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom, 1.75 percent The Road, Cormac McCarthy, 1.73 percent Watership Down, Richard Adams, 1.72 percent A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith, 1.72 percent Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein, 1.68 percent The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, 1.65 percent A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin, 1.65 percent Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume, 1.65 percent Charlotte's Web, E.B. White, 1.64 percent The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, 1.63 percent Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, 1.62 percent Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1.62 percent The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1.61 percent The Shack, William P. Young, 1.58 percent Watchmen, Alan Moore, 1.56 percent Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice, 1.55 percent The Odyssey, Homer, 1.54 percent The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende, 1.54 percent The Stranger, Albert Camus, 1.53 percent Call of the Wild, Jack London, 1.52 percent The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom, 1.51 percent Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, 1.51 percent East of Eden, John Steinbeck, 1.50 percent Matilda, Roald Dahl, 1.50 percent The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 1.49 percent Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig, 1.47 percent Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1.45 percent Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak, 1.45 percent Readers: How many of your favorite books and authors made the list? Image of bookshelf courtesy of Shutterstock.

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The Top 100 Books on Facebook

David Cohen

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