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Dec 19, 2019

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As an author focusing on African literature or a reader that enjoys its dynamic storytelling, chances are you have read a book published on Okadabooks. If you are a Nigerian, that probability increases. Since its inception in 2013, its popularity has skyrocketed ensuring that almost 500 Million pages are annually read. Recently, I looked into the book purchasing trends of its reader, their reading patterns and created a success metric for its authors. To make this short as possible, This article contains some of my findings while the rest and code details can be found here.

To be able to get my desired information, I needed to scrape all the book cards available on okadabooks.com. Every published book has a bookcard containing important information like Title, Price, Blurb, Ratings, Author, Number of Reads and Book cover. I wrote a web crawler to get all the details available on the site. More details here

Caveats: This data was scraped in October so some findings are subsequent to change as more books are being published every day on okadabooks.com. Scraping inefficiencies due to internet speed, 403 errors e.t.c suggests that about 80% of the total number of books on the website were gotten. This is still a good representation of the total dataset.

One of okadabooks’ core vision includes increasing accessibility of books to its readers. A huge percentage of these are Nigerians as the headquarters of the company is there. This is why the Prices of the books are in Naira (₦) as seen in the book card above. To enforce this vision, it earlier encouraged its authors to put the prices of the books within 1000 Naira.

Subconsciously, recommending this price bracket made a great percentage of its authors not to put a price on the books published. This, in turn, helped make this vision a reality. Almost half of the books published on okadabooks are free, 48% to be precise.

The vast majority of authors on okadabooks have written only one book with the top 1% having written more than 10 books. With 8835 authors, okadabooks has been the go-to site for most Nigerian authors with a lot of new authors encouraged to publish their books.

These are the top 10 authors with the most amount of reads. After going through the profiles on the list, I found the first name Okechukwu Ofili to be interesting. Okechukwu is the CEO and founder of okadabooks. This was intriguing because I had no idea its founder was a writer which prompted me to go read his books. In the list, Okadabooks.com is in the top 5 as it helps in distributing more books to cater to the vast categories on the site.

There is an author that goes by the name Unknown, which I found weird. After going to some of the books through the links, they all took me to the User Okadabooks Mechanic, an affiliate of the parent site. Here’s their profile to skim through some of their publications.

An author’s name is sometimes different from the User’s name

The huge percentage of free books on Okadabooks had a negative influence on authors trying to make some money from the site. For self-published authors relying heavily on the ebook platform, this could be downright frustrating. Their best bet could be to publish some hardcopies simultaneously during the publishing process. 89% of books with a price were bought less than 10 times.

Success is relative as most authors ranging from self-published ones to traditional writers have what they would describe as their book doing well. The aim was to generate a realistic metric for okadabooks’ authors by comparing the reads throughout the e-book platform.

One way of getting the success metric was by finding out how many reads exceptional books have. I inferred that an exceptional book receives the 99th percentile of reads. As the term, exceptional tends to be comparative, this measure seems reasonable.

To factor in purchasing power, two milestones were created: The first milestone and the Big star. The previous focused on only books with a price while the latter represents the whole dataset.

These are the first books to ever be published on Okadabooks. After a quick stroll through the website, I figured that all each book link had a unique number that did not repeat throughout the dataset. Getting the first three books that were published was easy from there. The last book published was termed The Rookie.

The first three books to be published on the site were How stupidity saved my life, How laziness saved my life (preview) and The Diary of a desperate naija woman. The first two books were published by the Founder and CEO of okadabooks, Okechukwu Ofili. The second publication, How laziness saved my life (preview) has the highest number of reads on the website with 14,000.

The last book to be published on okadabooks prior to me running my web crawler is The Influence Of Social Media On Depression & Suicide. The rookie was the 29,770th book to be published.

Okadabooks has encouraged new authors since its inception in 2013, averaging about four thousand books per year. This article looked to check the reading culture of its readers who are predominantly Nigerians while also generating a success metric for its authors. If you are looking for some good novels like The purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie and any other African Literature, I recommend going to get a copy of the e-book on the website.

Thank you for reading. Please follow and take a look at my other data science writeups if you enjoyed this one🙏🙏.