We are all familiar with the New York Times Best Seller list and all the other Ranking Lists which provide readers an easy way to find, choose and select their books. Most often than not, those list are based on sales volume only (the number of books sold).

Today with the digitalization of books, one could wonder why don’t we also Rank Books by the percentage of people who actually finish them (since this data is now available). A study as shown that in some cases, even among best sellers, less than half of the people actually finish the book they have started.

I think that combining both criteria could help people find and buy better books rather than books that are simply in fashion. Now that we have tons of data, many other criteria could also be used to refine the ranking lists (e.g. how long people take to read a particular book -> how “addictive” it is).

Using Different Sets Of Data To Rank Books was originally published in The blog of Nathanael Eisenberg on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.