The People, in the form of that one girl from high school and your mom’s pastor’s hairdresser, have declared the Harry Potter series the best books of all time, or at least the first ones they could think of off the top of their heads.
Two researchers, presumably of Britain’s prestigious Academy Of Wasting Time Online, have run the numbers on Facebook’s “Name 10 books That Have Influenced You” meme and determined that the Harry Potter series is the top book on Facebook users’ lists, followed by The Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, and a couple of books they read in the ninth grade. The Bible comes in at No. 6, which is a bit puzzling considering that it is the perfect word of God and obviously much better than some wizard book that turns innocent children into polyamorous Wiccans.
The researchers drew from a sample of some 130,000 Facebook updates, a tiny fraction of the social media juggernaut’s reported 829 million average daily users. Some 63.7 percent of respondents were from the U.S., 9.3 percent from India, 6.3 percent from the U.K., and the rest from an assortment of countries all over the world. The average respondent age was 37 and females outnumbered males three to one, which should be nothing new to anyone who’s been on Facebook lately.
[via The Telegraph]