Books and Statistics

I spent countless hours thinking what my first post should be about. I was tempted to write about the capital punishment or human rights in China but certain people advised me to keep it light and entertaining. Thus I decided to write about books and statistics, because what's more entertaining than books and statistics, right?

If you are like me and like to read your books in an organised fashion, there is no better place for you to go than www.goodreads.com. Goodreads allows you to catalogue all the books you have read, you are reading and you intend to read. You can rate and review them as well. Once you provide goodreads with all the necessary data you can clearly see when you read your books, how long it took you and even how long it was between the time you decided upon reading a book and the moment you actually read it. If you log in religiously for a year, goodreads will reward you with yearly statistics. Now you will know just how many books or pages (if this seems more relevant to you) you have read over the year and how many of them you rated with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. Do that for a few consecutive years and you can compare them and draw conclusions (ex. I shall be 125 years old when I finish 1001 Books to Read Before You Die). You can set yourself a yearly reading challenge (that usually is somewhere down the list of New Year's resolutions) and Goodreads will kindly keep track of it for you.

If this all sounds like heaven to you, you probably have some sort obsessive-compulsive disorder and you might want to see somebody about it. However, before you do, please log in to goodreads and become my friend here .

Now I meant to write about MY book statistics for 2010 but certain people told me to keep it short because people have a very short attention span these days. Also, I fear that many readers might not find it as fascinating as I do.

If you checked this post in hope to find some real statistics about books here they are:

1) 89.5% of people prefer to watching TV to reading books
2) On any given day 1 out of 5 people reading a book on public transport is reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy.
3) 115% teenage girls have read Twilight
4) Only one person in the world has read this book. Me.