What if it were readers who defined the “top-ten” books rather than the sales figures of station kiosks? Social networks are buzzing with the personal “top-ten” of Internet users who take pictures of the stack of their 10 favorite books. Let us take a look at this phenomenon via a study about top-ten authors carried out by Funambuline and Yannick Rochat.
The chart above shows the top ten books shared by Internet users in the 10 days following the launch of the hashtag #mytoptenbooks. The shared books are listed on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It indicates that 158 top-tens are strong, and each author is therefore necessarily linked to the 9 others who made up a top-ten. We observed and isolated top-ten authors who are only ranked as top-ten once on the right of the visualization. The chart appears that a majority of top-ten authors are ranked by users more than once. That is why you can see a fairly compact nebula in the center of the chart. However, the density of the network is not very high, and the most cited authors that are ranked as top-ten does not appear in more than 10% of the top-ten authors.
