Bestsellers at the Library

If there are no publishing problems, it takes about two to three weeks for a book to become available for check out after it appears on the New York Times Bestseller list. Sometimes we are really lucky and get a new bestseller in a week and a half.

The life-expectancy of a bestselling novel has halved within the last decade, according to a long-term study of fiction bestsellers by Lulu, the world's fastest-growing source of print-on-demand books. The average number of weeks that a new No. 1 bestseller stayed on top of the hardback fiction section of the NYT Bestseller list fell from 14 in the 1970s, to 22 in the 1960s, to 5.5 in the 1990s, to barely two weeks in 2005.

In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; and in 2005, 23 novels did. About 57% of the fiction bestsellers that debuted on the 2005 hardcover lists had runs of less than a month. Two fiction bestsellers that stayed on the list for longer than average were The Kite Runner and the The Da Vinci Code. Today I saw 6 copies of The Da Vinci Code on the shelf at Central, so I guess everyone has read that book.