What are the most popular library books?

65 percent of Americans use the nation’s 16,000 libraries, and those libraries spend almost $2 billion on books each year, about a fifth of the total market.

So which library books are most popular? And does it mirror the bestseller lists?

Here is the list of the top fifteen, an Adobe reader is required. Number one is The South Beach Diet, followed by some of the usual political books and Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The first book I enjoyed comes at number six with Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, here is my earlier summary.

My question is whether people are more likely to buy books and never read them, or take books out of the library and then never read them. The naive economist might think that you get more phoney-baloney behavior when the books are free. I suspect the opposite is true. If the book costs nothing, bringing it home involves little signaling or self-signaling. It might impress your neighbor to see a weighty tome on your bookshelves, but only if you had to spend money. So the good news would be that those people actually wanted to read the Greene book.

Here is the full story.

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