Every Thursday, I like to take a look at Amazon Charts. There are four of them, fiction and nonfiction, and what is being purchased and what is being read. I wrote about the Amazon Charts several times before:
https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/search?q=amazon+charts
I think it is impressive how J.K. Rowling's work dominates the Fiction Most Read chart. My theory is that adults sometimes read her Harry Potter works but on top of that, adults cannot read her fiction in the numbers that younger readers can. If you are at all interested, I recommend the movie about Rowling's amazing life, called "Magic Beyond Words". It seems to be available on both Amazon tv and Vudu.
Once a week, looking through all four charts does not take long and it seems to be a pretty good way to stay abreast of trends in popular reading. One aspect of ebooks is that using a Kindle reader (or Kobo or Nook or any other such device, including tablets, phones and computers) is that the total time a given page is showing is detectable. I imagine that artificial intelligence machines can or soon will discriminate between having a page up long enough to read and move on versus simply having one page showing while you prepare a meal over in the kitchen.
Online data and analysis can reveal all sorts of things that are new or more accurate or both. The book "Everybody Lies" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a good one for explaining new insights into human behavior that come from analysing data from online sources and from combining and contrasting such data with other sources such as location information and phone use, etc. The title Everybody Lies probably tells a truth but rather than focusing on purposeful lying, I suspect that the simple fact that machines can track us tirelessly is more important. We can't keep track of our hours looking at screens or watching tv or nibbling but machines can.
