Do Irish people have good eyesight?

I was pleased to receive my first ever statement today from the recently formed Irish plr system. If you've read my previous article on the British plr system you'll know I enjoyed analysing the living daylights out of their library lending statistics and so this brief summary gave me a great chance to do some more pointless number-crunching. There's not much to go on with only one year's figures available, but it's nice to see that all my books do still exist in at least one Irish library and that five (yes, that is five) people read my first book The Outlawed Deputy last year. It'd have been nice if the statement had included names and addresses so I could thank them all personally, but I guess those five people will have to remain anonymous.


Earlier I reported that my most borrowed book in Britain was Dead by Sundown, so I was intrigued to see that this title was also my most popular book in Ireland too. As I said before, the only explanation I can think of is that the title is good and that it has a great cover. I also noted that my least popular title in Britain was Mendosa's Gun-runners, but curiously that's my second most popular title in Ireland, so perhaps I shouldn't draw too many conclusions.

The most interesting thing for me was the spread of borrowing between the large print titles and the normal print. In Britain the Linford Western Large Prints are borrowed around 50% more often than the Black Horse Western originals, and yet in Ireland it's the other way round with BHWs being around twice as popular as the large prints. So either the Irish have better eyesight than we Brits or something else is going on. It might even suggest that there's a market the libraries aren't tapping into by not buying as many Linfords as Britain does.

Anyhow, roll on next year when I'll have two years to compare and I can really waste some time playing around with the numbers.