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Who Reads History Books?

I want to know who reads the monographs we produce in our profession. A recent book claims that the average academic monograph in the humanities sells about 200 copies. My own recent analysis of library purchasing trends since 1945 demonstrated an unmistakable decline in the acquisition of history books since the mid-1960s. There is some debate on whether this decline has happened because so many fewer college students major in history these days. Others have laid the blame on academic historians who don't try hard enough to write books that are interesting to the public. Whatever the cause may be for the shrinking sales of history books, I have a proposal for the profession on how we just might be able to measure our relevancy.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a team of social network analysts had an interesting idea for measuring political polarization. With data provided by Amazon.com, they created a map of who was purchasing the most popular political books. They discovered that as the election approached the number of books purchased by both liberals and conservatives slowly shrank until these two groups were reading virtually in nothing in common during the last month before the election. This kind of analysis was possible because of the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature provided by the Amazon web site.

I want to see the same thing done for history books. It think it would answer a lot of questions. Are the readers and writers of history books basically the same people? Or are there some history books that show up in the "also bought" lists for best-selling novels? How many of you believe a social network analysis of history books would provide valuable information? Or have academic historians essentially given up on the goal of writing for the public?

Posted on Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 10:57 PM | Comments (8) | Return

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