Red Book, Blue Book, Boo
Like Red States and Blue States, the books we read are separated by a unbridgeable cultural divide. Valdis Krebs, a man with entirely too much time on his hands, has taken some data from Amazon, and created a network map of books on current politics. Books are linked if they were purchased simultaneously.
[ Bigger image here]
hat tip: Marginal Revolution, via The Volokh Conspiracy
[wik] While this phenomenon no doubt holds for explicitly political/current affairs books, it becomes a lot less true once you move away from that arena. I'm not sure about Ross, but I know that the difference between Johno's and my taste in, say history, lies solely in the areas of history we are interested in rather than the political labeling of the title. Where our interests overlap - we start running into the same titles.
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I think it would be a very
I think it would be a very interesting exercise to do this with porn. Say, by genre.
Do the anal people really have that much in common with the oral people, for example? WHat would the "bridges" be between the "nodes" of gay porn and lesbian porn? And how would tentacles fit in? Er, into this model that is?
BH, there's an important
BH, there's an important difference with us-- we're career readers. I can't imagine that most people buying, say both "Savage Nation" and "Slander" together spend a lot of time reading widely in more intellectually rigorous and demanding history subfields like we do.