THAT left- and right-leaning Americans read different books might be the least surprising fact about publishing, and an analysis of book sales on Amazon bears this out. Valdis Krebs, a data scientist specialising in network analysis and visualisation, scraped data for The Economist from the site’s “Customers who bought…also bought…” feature and created the network diagram below. Readers of leftish tomes like “What Happened” by Hillary Clinton and “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate” have sent both books to the top of Amazon’s Best Sellers list, but they rarely buy books from across the aisle. And purchasers of conservative books like “Understanding Trump” and “Making of the President 2016” are even more partisan.

Only four of the 77 books in Mr Krebs’ dataset fall into the “crossover” category, and two of these deal with the story of the hapless Clinton campaign. The more popular of the two, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign”, is an account of Ms Clinton’s staff and messaging turmoil by two veteran journalists, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Politicos of all stripes seem to be interested in the story. Not so with “The Destruction of Hillary Clinton”, by a feminist professor at the University of Kentucky, Susan Bordo. She argues that America was simply not ready for such a strong woman. Most of its reviewers on Amazon seemed to agree, giving it five stars. Nearly all of those who disagreed did so violently, giving it one star; perhaps they bought the book mistakenly believing that the “destruction” of Ms Clinton promised in the title would be narrated with glee.

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