Hacking the Cultural Industries

Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products.

Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to use their data to study them. To that end, we created the Post45 Data Collective, an open access site that peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural data. This a partnership between the Data Collective and Public Books, a series called Hacking the Culture Industries, brings you data-driven essays that change how we understand audiobooks, bestselling books, streaming music, video games, influential literary institutions such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, and more. Together, they show a new way of understanding how culture is made, and how we can make it better.¹

In the essay, “Where is All the Book Data?”² Melanie Walsh introduces a series at Public Books,³ “Hacking the Culture Industries” that “demonstrates how corporate algorithms and data are shaping contemporary culture; but it also reveals how the same tools, in different hands, can be used to study, understand, and critique culture and its corporate influences in turn.”

BookScan Data

The single most influential data in the publishing industry—which, every day, determines book contracts and authors’ lives—is basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the industry. ⁴ See the video at the end of this post—The IBPA member benefit.

BookScan’s influence in the publishing world is clear and far-reaching. To an editor, BookScan numbers offer two crucial data points: (1) the sales history of the potential author, if it exists, and (2) the sales history of comparable, or “comp,” titles. These data points, if deemed unfavorable, can mean a book is dead in the water.⁵

Hacking the Cultural Industries

Other essays in this series:

• Audiobooks: Every Minute Counts⁶

• ARE SPOTIFY’S VIBES THE END OF SEGREGATED LISTENING? (THAT’S NOT WHAT THE DATA SAYS.)⁷

1. Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to use their data to study them. To that end, we created the Post45 Data Collective, an open access site that peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural data. This a partnership between the Data Collective and Public Books, a series called Hacking the Culture Industries, brings you data-driven essays that change how we understand audiobooks, bestselling books, streaming music, video games, influential literary institutions such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, and more. Together, they show a new way of understanding how culture is made, and how we can make it better.

—Laura McGrath and Dan Sinykin cited in Walsh, Melanie. “Where is All the Book Data?” Public Books. October 4, 2022.

2. Walsh, Melanie. “Where is All the Book Data?” Public Books. October 4, 2022.

3. Public Books unites the best of the university with the openness of the internet. The digital magazine was founded in 2012 by Sharon Marcus, a literature professor, and Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropologist. Their mission was simple: to publish writing that is erudite without being esoteric and brings scholarly depth to discussions of contemporary ideas, culture, and politics.

Public Books began with these precepts: that experts who devote their lives to mastering their subjects need to be heard. That it is desirable for academics to speak to a broader audience, and exciting for readers outside of the academy to debate what scholars have to say. Most importantly, that boundaries between disciplines and ways of knowing deserve to be bridged—and that barriers between the academy and the public deserve to be broken.

At Public Books, academics join with other public scholars, critics, and activists to make the life of the mind a public good.

4. See video, “The IBPA member benefit” and the end of this post and Walsh, Melanie. “Where is All the Book Data?” Public Books. October 4, 2022.

5. Walsh, Melanie. “Where is All the Book Data?” Public Books. October 4, 2022.

6. Berglund, Karl, “Audiobooks: Every Minute Counts.” Public Books. October 6. 2022.

7. Tom Mcenaney & Kaitlyn Todd ARE SPOTIFY’S VIBES THE END OF SEGREGATED LISTENING? (THAT’S NOT WHAT THE DATA SAYS.) Public Books. October 6. 2022.