If you know BookNet Canada, you know that we love analyzing and researching and reporting, and occasionally we even turn that analytical eye inwards.
At the end of last year, we wanted to know which blog posts were the most read during 2016, to gain some insight on the topics which attracted our readers the most. Instead of keeping that information to ourselves, we thought we'd share it with you to give you a chance to revisit some posts that you may have missed.
Top 10 posts visited in 2016*
How Do Canadians Spend Their Free Time?: We asked Canadians how they spend their leisure time and how much time they spend per day on those leisure activities.
The Definition of a Bestseller: What makes a book a bestseller? What needs to happen before the word “bestseller” can be put on a book cover?
Canadian Readers by the Numbers: A survey of Canadians’ reading and leisure habits: how and when they are reading books.
Top Canadian-authored bestsellers of 2015: We took a look at the bestselling Canadian-authored books of 2015 for Canada's 149th birthday in 2016.
Infographic: The Canadian Book Market 2015: We took some of the data from the Canadian Book Market 2015 report and prettied it up.
Who's Buying Self-Help Books?: We find that not all book buyers are created equal—buyers of each genre have their own own distinct patterns and habits.
Introducing Loan Stars!: Loan Stars is a new readers’ advisory service that allows library staff across Canada to nominate forthcoming titles and vote on their favourites.
Are Canadians spending their leisure time reading?: At Tech Forum 2016, BookNet's Tim Middleton presented some of the findings gathered from a leisure time survey focusing specifically on Canadians who selected reading as one of their top two preferred past-times.
Ask a Reader: subscription services: Wherein we answer the question "What subscription model for book-related apps or ebooks is most popular with consumers?"
What's in a box?: You can have a curated package of almost anything delivered to your door every month. They’re called subscription boxes and they’re spectacular.
*Honourable mention to Milking It: The Books That Couldn't Stop Selling In 2016 - we're confident this article would have made the top 10 given more time, but since it was published only on Dec. 19, 2016, it didn't have the time to accumulate the page views that all the other posts had.
Four out of the 10 top posts were written in 2016. The rest were from 2013, 2014, and 2015.
It turns out that BookNet blog readers really like to read about bestsellers: both the definition of and the top selling titles in a certain time period. The other posts can mostly be broken down into the following groups: how Canadians are spending their leisure time, specifically, are they spending it reading?; subscription services; and analyzing the Canadian reader and book buyer. The one post that stands alone is the introductory post to our Loan Stars program—a readers' advisory service that allows library staff across Canada to nominate forthcoming titles and vote on their favourites.
What happens when you take the text from all these blog posts and make it into a word cloud? Were you wondering that or was it just us? Either way, now we know. It looks like this:
So there you have it. The most visited BookNet Canada blog posts in 2016. We wonder what next year's trends will be?
