Book
Description

Sophia Falmagne’s Book documents a web search for “the best book ever written.” It captures the top results from Google Search and Yahoo! Answers, and includes the New York Times, Time Magazine, and BBC bestseller lists. All content is copied as it appears in the browser, preserving the original formatting and including all text and images for ads and suggested articles. The major part of Book is taken up by “an alphabetical listing by author of adult fiction books which have made number one on the New York Times Best Seller List along with the date that they first reached number one,” beginning with the year 1942. This not only results in an “assortment of images and content from the web documenting information about literature and popular preference in book-reading, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” as the blurb on Lulu suggests, but also reflects opinion formation in the age of Web 2.0 as opposed to traditional ways of canon formation and sales. This online-offline dichotomy is also visible in the design of the front cover and back cover: the front shows a stylized book icon, while the back is the scanned back cover of an older book, presumably from Google Books. The book was produced in Danny Snelson’s experimental writing class “Print-on-Demand Poetry: Making Books After the Internet” at Northwestern University in 2015.