Borrowed or Bought? The Books Ireland Couldn’t Put Down in 2024

This Sunday is Public Libraries Open Day – the perfect day to celebrate the fabulous national asset that is Ireland’s public library network. Our libraries provide so much more than just books these days and are an amazing community resource.

Looking at the ‘most borrowed books’ in several public library branches for a local authority client, I was curious to know whether in Ireland as a whole, our book borrowing and book buying habits coincide. Fortunately, the ranks for the top 20 most borrowed and purchased books in 2024 are publicly available, and I was able to take a look.

Focusing on adult fiction (the children’s lists are dominated by the Dog Man and Wimpy Kid series), a first glance shows that only 5 titles appear on both: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, and No One Saw a Thing by Andrea Mara. Perhaps the combined impact of prizes, celebrity book clubs and Hollywood might explain the top 20 ranking of these books on both lists. But it is immediately apparent (and curious) that the top most borrowed book in 2024 – Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond – does not appear in the top 20 of the most purchased books.

(You can sort the chart below by clicking on 'Borrowed' or 'Purchased' in the header).

Since we have the rankings of books on both lists, we can go a little deeper with a rank-weighted feature similarity analysis. (Specifically, for each title, I extracted metadata such as author gender, nationality and genre and used a rank-weighted mean to calculate feature scores for each list, which I then compared using the Gower similarity measure). It turns out that, while only 25% of the book titles overlap, the types of books on the two lists (in terms of author nationality or gender, book genre etc) are quite similar, especially when taking account of rank on the list (71% ‘similarity’ using my Gower similarity measure).

In this analysis, the lists were most similar in terms of the nationality of the author (21 of the 35 titles across both lists are by Irish authors). They differed mainly in terms of genre, with crime / thriller / mystery books more likely to be amongst the ‘most borrowed’ while ‘popular fiction’ titles are amongst the most purchased. But these differences tend to be small – despite the small number of title overlaps, in terms of characteristics, the two lists are actually quite similar.

Of course, for any book published in 2024 itself, the date of publication will influence its rank (since books released in January will accrue more loans or sales over the course of the year than those released later on). 24 of the 35 book titles across both lists had been published prior to 2024 and of the remaining 11, most had been published in the summer of that year. So the next step might be to control for publication date. And it would be even better if we knew the numbers of books borrowed or bought, rather than just the ranks, but unfortunately this type of data doesn't seem to be publicly available.

But even this simple analysis suggests that, whether we are library borrowers or book shoppers, we all really love reading Irish authors! That is good news for everyone this Public Libraries Open Day.