10 Recent Google Trends in the World of Books and Reading

Johann Thorsson

Staff Writer

Johann Thorsson is a native of Iceland, but spends much of his time in Bookland. He has lived in a few parts of the world but currently lives in Iceland with a pretty woman and a mischievous son who resembles Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) more each day. He has a complicated but ultimately useless degree in bioinformatics from a very pretty college in England. His favorite books are 1984, Flowers for Algernon and The English Patient. He hopes one day to call himself a writer without feeling like he's just fooling himself. Blog: Johann Thorsson - On Book and Writing Twitter: @johannthors

Popularity is a fickle thing, and not to be trusted. Lucky for us, Google knows what’s hot and what’s not.

I took a look at a few terms people search for on Google, using their clever Trends tool. Trends allows you to see the popularity of a search term over time, so we can actually see how many people are searching for something on Google.

Like, say, “curling” (guess which years are winter Olympics years):

Curling

But exciting as curling is, I’m more interested in books. So, I present: Trends in Books and Booky Stuff:

The graphs all measure a terms relative popularity from 2005 to today, so there is always a peak point, against which the overall popularity is measured. You grok? Good. Let’s get started.

1. “Books”

Books

2. “Book”

Book

3. “Reading”

Reading

4. “Amazon Kindle”

AmazonKindle

5. “J.K. Rowling”

JKRowling

6. “50 Shades of Grey”

50Shades

7. “Stephen King”

StephenKing

8. “The Great Gatsby”

GreatGatsby

9. “Short stories”

ShortStories

And finally, just for fun…

10. “Sex in books”

SexInBooks

_________________________

Sign up for our newsletter to have the best of Book Riot delivered straight to your inbox every week. No spam. We promise.

To keep up with Book Riot on a daily basis, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, , and subscribe to the Book Riot podcast in iTunes or via RSS. So much bookish goodness–all day, every day.