So here are some interesting facts about books and authors that will be continued in later posts. All presented statistics is based on the (English) Wikipedia (of course for the SPARQL queries we use DBpedia)...but nevertheless, it is wikipedia knowledge.
There are currently 15,328 authors listed (i.e. they are member of the class dbpedia-owl:Writer). First thing I wanted to find out was, who are the most prolific authors according to Wikipedia (at least this means, whose works also exist as Wikipedia Pages and who are connected via dbpedia-owl:author).
Well, here are the Top 40 Most Prolific Writers:
| name | numOfWorks | popularityOfWorks |
|---|---|---|
| "L. Sprague de Camp"@en | 128 | 10.9 |
| "Agatha Christie"@en | 103 | 32.7 |
| "Isaac Asimov"@en | 75 | 28.3 |
| "Stephen King"@en | 75 | 44.0 |
| "Philip K. Dick"@en | 74 | 14.4 |
| "Edgar Rice Burroughs"@en | 73 | 18.7 |
| "Ruth Rendell"@en | 70 | 5.3 |
| "Dean Koontz"@en | 67 | 6.2 |
| "Lin Carter"@en | 64 | 9.0 |
| "Terry Pratchett"@en | 63 | 41.7 |
| "Jules Verne"@en | 63 | 31.2 |
| "P. G. Wodehouse"@en | 63 | 20.9 |
| "Robert E. Howard"@en | 62 | 10.5 |
| "Gary Paulsen"@en | 61 | 4.1 |
| "K. A. Applegate"@en | 61 | 18.5 |
| "August Derleth"@en | 60 | 5.2 |
| "John Dickson Carr"@en | 59 | 5.9 |
| "H. G. Wells"@en | 57 | 30.0 |
| "James Patterson"@en | 56 | 12.0 |
| "Leslie Charteris"@en | 55 | 8.8 |
| "Robert A. Heinlein"@en | 52 | 36.5 |
| "Rex Stout"@en | 52 | 21.4 |
| "Arthur C. Clarke"@en | 50 | 20.8 |
| "Harry Turtledove"@en | 49 | 11.3 |
| "Ray Bradbury"@en | 49 | 15.3 |
| "David Weber"@en | 49 | 30.9 |
| "Danielle Steel"@en | 48 | 3.3 |
| "J. M. G. Le Clézio"@en | 48 | 3.7 |
| "Henry James"@en | 48 | 18.5 |
| "Piers Anthony"@en | 48 | 14.0 |
| "Clive Cussler"@en | 47 | 10.1 |
| "Roger Zelazny"@en | 45 | 10.5 |
| "Alan Dean Foster"@en | 44 | 6.7 |
| "Joe R. Lansdale"@en | 43 | 4.7 |
| "Gordon R. Dickson"@en | 41 | 5.0 |
| "Marion Zimmer Bradley"@en | 41 | 7.6 |
| "Samuel R. Delany"@en | 41 | 9.0 |
| "Bernard Cornwell"@en | 40 | 16.6 |
| "Enid Blyton"@en | 40 | 6.8 |
| "Dr. Seuss"@en | 40 | 26.5 |
Well, let's turn it the other way around. Let's sort this list by the average popularity of the books of these authors....
Here is the Top 40 list of the authors with the most popular books (on average):
| name | numOfWorks | popularityOfWorks |
|---|---|---|
| "John Simpson (lexicographer)"@en | 1 | 1627.0 |
| "John Milton"@en | 1 | 669.0 |
| "Kenneth Grahame"@en | 1 | 423.0 |
| "Emily Brontë"@en | 1 | 387.0 |
| "Wilhelm Grimm"@en | 1 | 343.0 |
| "Jacob Grimm"@en | 1 | 343.0 |
| "Harper Lee"@en | 1 | 334.0 |
| "Lewis Carroll"@en | 6 | 319.8 |
| "Miguel de Cervantes"@en | 4 | 310.5 |
| "Jonathan Swift"@en | 2 | 303.5 |
| "Wilbert Awdry"@en | 1 | 296.0 |
| "Cao Xueqin"@en | 1 | 291.0 |
| "Giovanni Boccaccio"@en | 1 | 287.0 |
| "William Shakespeare"@en | 3 | 264.6 |
| "Ian McFarlane"@en | 1 | 255.0 |
| "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry"@en | 1 | 253.0 |
| "Margaret Mitchell"@en | 2 | 242.0 |
| "Suetonius"@en | 1 | 229.0 |
| "Roger Hargreaves"@en | 2 | 214.0 |
| "Joseph O'Neill (writer)"@en | 1 | 211.0 |
| "T. S. Eliot"@en | 2 | 186.0 |
| "George Bernard Shaw"@en | 2 | 184.5 |
| "Harriet Beecher Stowe"@en | 3 | 173.6 |
| "Petronius"@en | 1 | 162.0 |
| "Charles Dickens"@en | 30 | 159.5 |
| "Johanna Spyri"@en | 1 | 156.0 |
| "Herman Melville"@en | 7 | 154.7 |
| "Jaroslav Hašek"@en | 1 | 152.0 |
| "Pierre Choderlos de Laclos"@en | 1 | 152.0 |
| "Oscar Wilde"@en | 3 | 148.0 |
| "Dave Arneson"@en | 3 | 146.0 |
| "Ngô Sĩ Liên"@en | 1 | 145.0 |
| "John Eric Holmes"@en | 2 | 143.5 |
| "Carlo Collodi"@en | 1 | 142.0 |
| "George Orwell"@en | 11 | 135.0 |
| "Erik Mona"@en | 3 | 134.6 |
| "Daniel Defoe"@en | 5 | 132.8 |
| "Monte Cook"@en | 3 | 132.3 |
| "Apuleius"@en | 1 | 132.0 |
| "Dan Brown"@en | 6 | 126.6 |
In this list it seems that it is more about literary excellency. Only one author with a rather prolific output is found, which is Charles Dickens with 30 listed Books. But, to find also Dan Brown on this list tells me, that popularity doesn't hold for literary excellency or quality. At least he is last among the Top 40 after Herman Melville, George Orwell, Daniel Defoe, Lewis Caroll or Jonathan Swift. On the other hand, John Milton did not become rich with his one shot Paradise Lost although it is rather popular.
Here are the links to the online queries to get the most recent and complete results:
Enjoy....I'll be back, when I will find again something interesting ;-)
