The Countries Race

This visualisation represents the number of authors from each country over time, with the option to scale by million inhabitants. The data spans from 2013 to 2022, which corresponds to the range available in the International Bestsellers dataset. We chose to only show the top 10 countries.

Even though the United States publishes more books overall, it does not have the highest ratio of authors per million inhabitants. Switching to the scaled view reveals that Iceland reaches around 32 authors per million inhabitants in 2022, making it by far the most represented country relative to its size.

It is interesting to see the top 3 shift between views: scaled it is Iceland, Norway and Spain, unscaled it is the United States, France and Spain. Spain’s author count is high enough that it holds its place in the top 3 either way.

Toggle the button to see the race with data scaled by inhabitants.