Study Finds a Nation of Polarized Readers

The NY Times has a story on Valdis Krebs, a social-network analyst in Cleveland.

Curious to learn something about consumers of political titles in a tense election year, in January he analyzed purchase patterns for political titles, using the Times’s list and the Internet. First, he plugged titles from the list of The Times into Amazon.com and Barnes &Noble.com. Then, thanks to a “customers who bought this book also bought” feature on the Web sites, he was able to determine what other titles buyers had purchased at the same time. Following the links between titles, Mr. Krebs ended up with a list of 66 books.