2015 in numbers

I like looking at statistics, but my tolerance for putting them together is limited, so I'm going to try to keep things simple this year.

Watching:

In 2016, I may start trying to use LibraryThing to catalog my TV and movie watching as well as my reading. For one thing, I'd love to have an exportable list of everything I've watched. For another, I'm terrible at remembering to keep up with my "things I've watched" spreadsheet. I have almost no data for the past year beyond what my blog can tell me.

Here's what I do know:

I watched and reviewed 14 different TV shows and 19 different movies - not surprising, since I spent a good chunk of the year trying to watch and review (and offload) as many of the DVDs I owned as possible. Of the 33 things I watched, 24 were live action and 7 were Japanese anime. A few months ago, I started subscribing to DramaFever, and I've been watching a lot of Asian live action TV (particularly Korean) since then.

Reading:

I figured out how to export stuff from LibraryThing using tags and collections to filter the results, which helped a lot. The only problem was that I didn't always tag things with an eye towards being able to pull useful/interesting data out at a later date. There were also a couple spots where the numbers didn't quite seem to match up, and I didn't really feel like sifting through it all to figure out the reason why. This is supposed to be for my personal enjoyment, not a journal article.

Average Ratings:

I don't include ratings on this blog, but I do in LibraryThing and on Booklikes. Out of the 137 (although BookLikes says 138) things I read in 2015, I gave ratings to 135 of them. My average rating was 3.25 stars.

However, I've always thought I go easier on graphic novels and manga than I do on everything else, so I decided to take a look at that too. Of the 137 things I read, 62 were graphic novels, manga, manhua, or manhwa, and I rated 61 of them. My average rating was 3.47 stars.

My tagging system didn't make it easy to pick out the novels, short stories, and novellas - my final spreadsheet had 75 works in it. Of those, 74 had been rated. My average rating was 3.07 stars.

So my average rating for manga and graphic novels is nearly half a star higher than for novels, novellas, and short stories. Either I tend to seek out better quality manga and graphic novels than I do novels and short stories, or I'm rate novels and short stories more harshly than manga and graphic novels.

Paper books vs. E-books vs. Audiobooks:

I still read graphic novels and manga almost entirely in paper form, due to most of the publishers I know refusing to (or not being able to) offer DRM-free versions, so I'm not going to be factoring those in.

Of the 75 works I read and listened to, 21 were paper books (28%), 36 were e-books (48%), and 18 were audiobooks (24%). I read more e-books than paper books, but paper books still haven't disappeared from my regular reading, and at this point it doesn't look like they're going to.

Of the paper books I read, 6 were purchased brand new, 6 were purchased used, and 9 came from the library. Of the e-books I read, 29 were purchased (all new - it's not currently possible to buy used e-books), 3 were freebies, and 4 came from the library. Unfortunately, none of this lines up very well with the huge amount of books, both used and new, that I bought in the past year. Oops.

Things got a little more interesting as far as my audiobooks were concerned. This past year, I started an Audible subscription. Instead of dropping it a couple months after I started, the way I'd originally planned, I kept going, and it shows in my stats. Of the audiobooks I listened to, 1 was a freebie, 7 came from the library, and 10 were purchased brand new (all Audible audiobooks).

That's about all the numbers I'm willing to crunch at the moment. Here's hoping I can work up the energy to put a few "best" and "worst" lists together soon.