Books are timeless.
They capture knowledge. They hold stories that don't expire. Even with AI, they're not going away anytime soon.
But the way we measure their success is broken.
Today, almost everything in publishing is driven by sales numbers — what gets promoted, what gets published, what gets funded.
That sounds reasonable.
But it's not accurate.
Book sales are surprisingly hard to track. Publishers rely on fragmented data from retailers. Platforms like Amazon hold valuable reading data — but don't share it.
And even if sales were perfectly tracked, one question remains:
Did anyone actually read the book?
More than half of all purchased books are never read.
There's even a word for it in Japanese: Tsundoku — buying books and letting them pile up unread.
So we optimize an entire industry around a metric that doesn't reflect the actual outcome.
A book that sells well but isn't read is considered a success. A book that's deeply read but sells less is not.
Even digital formats don't solve this.
E-readers try to track behavior — but accounts are shared, books are bought as gifts, and recommendations quickly break down.
The result is a system that looks precise — but misses what actually matters.
A book only has impact if someone actually reads it.