“Beach reads” are like “beach bodies.” If your body is at the beach, it’s a beach body. If you read a book at the beach, it’s a “beach read”! Publishers, however, have built a well-defined “beach read” track—a succession of books by popular authors published for the summer season. Booksellers and librarians know this, but we wanted to put some data behind the phenomenon. So we pulled sixteen authors known for summer books—eight romance and eight thriller—and tracked patron interest in everything they’ve written, new and old, from the start of 2022 through this past August, using the same data behind our monthly Top Titles posts. The data is fun, and several discoveries popped out.
Today is World Book Day, and to celebrate we thought we’d do something fun with the Syndetics Unbound data. We pulled two years of the most searched and viewed titles across U.S. public libraries—the same data behind our Top Titles posts—and built a tour of the planet, with the top author and book per country, from almost 80 nations, all the way from Argentina to Zimbabwe. We finished up by making book maps for Africa and Europe.
On Friday, Project Hail Mary opened in theaters to rave reviews and an impressive $80m in domestic box-office. If you’re a librarian, you saw it coming—a flood of patrons eager to read Andy Weir’s original 2021 novel before the movie adaptation came out. It may have seemed like the book was as popular—or more popular!—than ever. And you’re expecting that to continue, as interested movie-goers head to the library to get the complete story. Syndetics Unbound can put numbers to what you saw.
