Ever wonder what patrons are searching for in library catalogs? We have the answers for 2020, aggregated from all the public libraries that use Syndetics Unbound.
United States
Top Fifteen
These were the top fifteen most searched-for books of 2020 in US public libraries.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Camino Winds by John Grisham
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
The Guest List: A Novel by Lucy Foley
The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
Walk the Wire by David Baldacci
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
Fair Warning by Michael Connelly
The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben
Month by Month
The top books above are mostly popular books that stayed popular for much of the year. Others were released mid-year, or went up and down more rapidly. Month by month the top books were:
January.Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
February.American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
March.Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
April.Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
May.Camino Winds by John Grisham
June.White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
July.Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump
August.The Guest List by Lucy Foley
September.All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny
October.A Time for Mercy by John Grisham
November.A Time for Mercy by John Grisham
December (so far).Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
The Summer of Anti-Racism Books
The George Floyd
protests began in Minneapolis on May 26, in reaction to the homicide of George
Floyd at the hands of police the previous day. Black Lives Matter protests
spread across the country by early June. Librarians responded by compiling and
promoting lists of anti-racist titles, and patrons sought them out in the
catalog.
The chart below shows the percentage of searches for a number of popular
titles. All dates are for the first day of a seven-day week. As you can see,
searches peaked in early June, when these four titles alone comprised almost 4%
of catalog searches.
Other Countries
Here are some top-ten most searched-for titles from public libraries around the world.
United Kingdom
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
The Lantern Men by Elly Griffiths
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Australia
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The Survivors by Jane Harper
Boy Swallows Universe: A Novel by Trent Dalton
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan
Normal People by Sally Rooney
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
The Yield: A Novel by Tara June Winch
Dark Emu: Black Seeds Agriculture or Accident? by Bruce Pascoe
Grown-Ups by Marian Keyes
Canada
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Camino Winds by John Grisham
Walk the Wire by David Baldacci
Fair Warning by Michael Connelly
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny
The Guest List: A Novel by Lucy Foley
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
How Do We Know?
This data was collected by Syndetics Unbound. The search data is fully
anonymized the day it is collected. As the Coronavirus lockdowns caused a
significant drop in catalog searches, and Syndetics Unbound added new libraries
continuously throughout the year, we levelled the playing field by treating all
months as equal in size.
