Bestselling books of 2011

What were the most popular books in the UK in 2011? Nielsen Bookscan is the world’s largest book tracking service – they collect total transaction data directly from the tills and dispatch systems of all major book retailers. The data covers over 90% of all retail book purchases in the UK – 6,500 retailers in the UK each week.

In this blog, we analyse the top 5,000 books sold in the UK. Of the nearly 5,000 books detailed in the 2011 charts, 1,695, were published before 2010. The charts are dominated by movie tie-ins and older books. The number one slot held by One Day, followed by Christmas number one chef Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals. From a value perspective, Jamie’s book comes on top followed by One Day.

14.5% of the books (701 books) are General & Literary Fiction, followed by Crime, Thriller & Adventure 10.4% (502 books).

Click on the visualisation below to highlight and filter data.

Who works the most in Europe?

Surprisingly it is not the Germans!  We’ve undertaken an analysis using data from the Office for National Statistics.

We have analysed the data based on employment type, productivity and by sector.

Austrians work the longest hours, 43.7 per week, and surprisingly share the top spot with Greece. This compares with 42 hours in Germany and 42.7 in the UK. Danes seems to have a good work life balance claiming the bottom of the league with 39.1 hours.

A better indicator of work completed is productivity per hour (with 100 representing the EU average). This is lead by the Netherlands and France and Germany, UK just above EU average, Greece way down the list, and Romania claiming the worst spot.