Human Swarms and Nineteen Eighty-Four's Amazon Sales

Amazon.com sales of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four have jumped 6,108 per cent over the past few days. The dystopian fiction, which was ranked in the bottom 7,000 in the bestseller's list last week, is now the 124th most popular book in America.

Coincidentally, it was also an excellent numbers week for 'Light Plane Maintenance' (up 741% in Magazines) and the quantity of people worried about the government reading private emails.

In the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four, There's been no Christmas Number One campaign, no Facebook event championing the cause, no rise in Google searches for the book or its author (See below). This was just one of those things. A natural swarm towards Orwell's chilling vision of the future; an organic response to recent developments.


Last week's Channel 4 documentary The Human Swarm is nice background viewing on this topic; how purchases are dictated by external factors like the weather or the news cycle. It's genuinely interesting stuff and well worth your time if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Closure threat to Manchester Science Museum (Twitter reactions)

Yesterday, the Manchester Evening News ran a story claiming that the ace Museum of Science and Industry was potentially under threat of closure.

I've plucked some charts from a few analytics tools to show the scale of conversation on Twitter about the museum's closure. Each chart demonstrates the popularity of a particular keyword (as some people might just use the handle of the museum, while others might just share the link).

Most popular tweeted links

Tweets mentioning the museum's Twitter handle '@voiceofmosi' (583 in total)

Tweets mentioning 'Museum of Science and Industry' (2,417 in total)

Tweets mentioning 'MOSI' (1685 in total)

Tweets mentioning the hashtag '#SaveMosi' (1586 in total)

The location and reach of the references to MOSI