Illiterati

Three charts are read on the same morning: Apple Books’ top hundred, Libby’s most-borrowed and Audible’s top fifty. Apple stamps an audiobook’s ISBN into its own artwork, and Libby carries the same number, so those two join on it wherever both have one. Everything else joins by title, checked against the author’s name where a title is short enough to belong to two books. This morning that joined 161 Audible titles to the other charts, and found 4 audiobooks on the other two that Audible is not charting at all.

The order is a sum. A book’s standing on each chart, as a fraction of that chart’s depth — first of a hundred is worth 1, hundredth is worth 1/100, absent is 0 — added across the three. A book near the top of all three sits above one at the top of two, and a book on one chart alone sits low however high it stands there. That is a reasonable ordering rather than an observed one, which is why every row prints the three standings it was made from: the number is this site’s, and the standings are the charts’.

Libby is a chart of borrowing, not of buying, which is why it is here rather than a fourth shop. It is averaged over 4 library systems — New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago — because what differs between library systems is not taste but what they happen to stock, and averaging is how a title one of them does not own stops falling off the chart for everybody.

What is not here, and why. The New York Times list needs a key, and this site runs on none. Libro.fm, Bookshop, StoryGraph and Kobo refuse anything that is not a browser. Amazon publishes a chart and serves a bot check instead of it. Neither is a judgement about the books on them.

A book on Apple or Libby that Audible is not charting has no page here and is not linked, because there is nothing on this site to send you to. It is still on the chart. Leaving it off would make this a chart of what we sell, which is the thing it exists not to be.