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yagibear

ranked by check outs p.a.:

rank, title, total check outs, date of publication, check outs p.a.

1 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 231,022 1998 10501

2 The Snowy Day 485,583 1962 8372

3 Where the Wild Things Are 436,016 1963 7649

4 The Cat in the Hat 469,650 1957 7455

5 To Kill a Mockingbird 422,912 1962 7292

6 1984 441,770 1949 6222

7 Charlotte's Web 337,948 1952 4970

8 Fahrenheit 451 316,404 1953 4722

9 The Very Hungry Caterpillar 189,550 1969 3717

10 How to Win Friends and Influence People 284,524 1936 3387

Data from https://125.nypl.org/125/topcheckouts which mentions other factors, such as shorter books having higher turnover.

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How is 10,000 checkouts a year possible? Do they have 50 copies or something?

The NYPL is a big library system! Currently it seems they have at least 166 copies of Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone[0]. Probably more: I think these are only the copies of the standard edition, and they also seem to have a few copies of an illustrated edition, some special editions, etc., plus of course translations.

[0]: https://catalog.nypl.org/search~S1?/Xharry+potter+and+the+so...,

Harry Potter was and is super popular. My dinky county library system has 11 physical copies in US english, one in UK english, several non-english languages, and ebooks; our 2010 census county population was only 250k. It's easy to imagine a library that serves a much larger population would need many more copies today, and many more when the book was new, and when the movie was new, and extra copies of the first book when each book and movie came out. Several of my friends would try to read all the existing books timed to finish when a new book was released. Some people would certainly be borrowing those books from the library, especially where people don't have a lot of space for personal libraries.

Exactly. Remember the days of Blockbuster, they'd have an entire shelf dedicated to 50 copies of a single movie.

Partly to handle actual demand, but, perhaps unlike the library, I imagine it was also partly to generate artificial demand by signaling: "Hey, you, undecided wanderer, look here, this is an important movie that everyone else is renting, you should too."

I remember reading/hearing that blockbuster did that as their competitive advantage over other video stores- they’d build customer loyalty by definitely having the latest thing in stock, even if it was a loss leader.

Far more than 50 for most of these.

The first run of the first edition of any book is a prized edition for collectors, but quite a lot of first editions actually go into library systems.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (the UK title of Sorcerer's Stone), had a first run of 500 copies. 300 of those went into libraries where they of course were not kept in pristine condition. As a result a fine edition goes for a fair few quid - tens of thousands of dollars, and potentially more.

So, public libraries often have lots of copies of popular books, and may even have several first editions in their collection. They won't be worth much in their usual library state, so anybody thinking of reading this and hoping to steal them: please don't.

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