Popularity Contest

[stdesjardins]

I took another look at the Project Gutenberg download statistics, trying to work out which of the books I'd done were most popular. I didn't check all the books, but I checked all of the ones that I thought were plausibly popular, plus a lot I was just curious about, and I came up with a list of ten that had more than a hundred downloads in the last thirty days, plus three others that I'd scanned but which other people had post-processed:

1. The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo (465)
2. Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays (450) (scan only)
3. Poems by Christina Rossetti (295) (scan only)
4. True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office by Arthur Train (293)
5. The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin (274) (scan only)
6. The Mystery of 31 New Inn by R. Austin Freeman (259)
7. The Old Man in the Corner by the Baroness Orczy (256)
8. John Thorndyke's Cases by R. Austin Freeman (236)
9. The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman (187)
10. Fifty-Two Stories For Girls (186)
11. 813 by Maurice Leblanc (139)
12. The Forty-Five Guardsmen by Alexandre Dumas (126)
13. Crime: Its Cause and Treatment by Clarence Darrow (121)

The book I found with the fewest downloads was Dainty's Cruel Rivals by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, a dire pulp romance, which was downloaded only six times in the last thirty days. Bad 19th century romance stories did poorly in general. For a while, I would try to scan one or two a year to run through DP on Valentine's Day, but I haven't done any in a while, and seeing how unpopular they are does nothing to change my mind.

Incidentally, it takes about a hundred downloads per day to break into Project Gutenberg's top 100. None of my books are doing anywhere near that.

Edited to add: I just found a book with only 3 downloads: Where the Sabots Clatter Again by Katherine Shortall, a few anecdotes of her time in France in the Red Cross during World War I. It's a crime that Dainty's Cruel Rivals is getting twice as many downloads.

Comments

[selki.livejournal.com]

Sabots link is broken. I'm guessing you meant http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13048 ?

[selki.livejournal.com]

and bookmarked this page for when I next go on a download binge