Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of the bestseller ranks on the book circulations in public libraries. To achieve this goal, the weekly data sets of 179 books’ library circulation and bestseller list from January 1, 2018 to December 29, 2019 were constructed based on the data collected from BigData MarketC and YES24. Three methods for analyzing panel data including linear regression, fixed-effect, and random effect models were compared, and it turned out that fixed-effect model was better than other methods. The results show that the average ranks of bestsellers were associated with their public library circulations visually. Also, the analysis of fixed-effect model showed that the single rank decline of a book on the bestseller list decreases its average circulation of 0.108 while the size of effect varied depending on subject of books. The study empirically demonstrated the impact of a bestseller list on people’s book circulation behavior, suggesting that public libraries need to reference sociocultural context as well as bestseller book lists to predict library user needs and to formulate collection development policy.