Since podcasting expanded in the 2010s (McGregor, 2022), book podcasts—ranging from in-depth literary discussions to author interviews—have become influential platforms for public book conversations. They engage broader audiences in ways traditional review outlets (e.g., newspapers) often cannot. In particular, non-fiction book podcasts help make copyrighted scholarly works more accessible by unpacking professional knowledge through conversational formats (Symulevich et al. 2025). To better understand the development and impacts of book podcasts, this study examines podcast data from the New Books Network (NBN), a U.S.-based “consortium of author-interview podcast channels” (New Books Network n.d.a) featuring “new scholarly, non-fiction, and literary books” (New Books Network n.d.b).

While existing research on book podcasting has examined its effectiveness in knowledge dissemination (DeMarco 2022; Priem et al. 2022; Rehman et al. 2024) and user interaction (Döring et al. 2022), this study shifts attention to the books featured on these platforms through the lens of critical cultural analytics and library science. As book podcasts gain more popularity, their selection of books may increasingly influence which titles audiences encounter, read, and discuss. Therefore, we look into their book coverage across genres, authors, and publishers, motivated by broader concerns about skewed book publicity and limited reviewing inclusivity on social platforms such as Goodreads (Hu et al. 2025).

We collected the data of all channels from NBN from September 11 to 17, 2025, and conducted exploratory analysis on the datasets. Between 2008 and 2025, NBN released 90,698 episodes across 132 genre-designated channels. As shown in Table 1, episode counts appear more evenly distributed across channels than the genre distributions observed on platforms such as Goodreads. These channels were defined and assigned by NBN. Channel “activeness” varies: American Studies—a channel established in 2018—has produced the most episodes (4,481), whereas the New Books Network en español channel, launched in 2023, has only eight. Additionally, channel-level output changes over time, as illustrated in Figure 1. Mapping the output of the top 10 most active channels, Figure 1 shows a decline in European Studies from 14% of all episodes in 2009 to about 2% in 2025, and reflects the rise of the American Studies Channel around 2018.

Table 1. Episode Counts by Channel

Figure 1. Percentage of Episodes for Top 10 Channels from 2008 to 2025

Because the same book may appear in multiple channels, we deduplicated titles when analyzing book coverage. The resulting dataset includes 22,367 unique books written by 20,626 unique authors. As shown in Figure 2, the number of unique books has increased continuously since 2008, with particularly rapid growth between 2017 and 2022. The slight downturn from 2024 to 2025 likely reflects the fact that our data was collected in September 2025.

Figure 2. Number of Podcast Episodes Produced Annually

On average, an author has only one work featured on NBN. Only three authors—Jeremy Black, Thomas Aiello, and Brian Clegg—have more than five books discussed. This distribution suggests a relatively “egalitarian” pattern of author visibility across the platform. However, the representation of publishers is considerably more concentrated. The 22,367 books were published by 2,844 unique publishers, yet only a small subset—10.8% of publishers (n = 307)—accounts for over 80% of all books featured, reflecting a Pareto-like cumulative distribution. Figure 3 highlights the top 20 publishers, with Oxford University Press leading with more than 1,600 books being featured by NBN. By contrast, nearly 60% (n=1,680) of the publishers appear only once in the dataset.

Figure 3. Top 20 Most Featured Publishers Featured in NBN, with the Number of Books

In summary, as a case study of book visibility in non-fiction book podcasting, this preliminary work examined the New Books Network’s book coverage across book channels (genres), authors, and publishers. Existing findings indicate relatively balanced genre representation and generally egalitarian author visibility, but a concentrated publisher landscape. These patterns suggest that podcasts may contribute to diversifying what readers encounter, while still reflecting structural problems in academic publishing (Wellmon / Piper 2017). In addition, we argue that the total size of books covered by this podcast makes it a useful data source to understand the impact of non-fiction and academic books.

We are currently collecting and aligning data from additional podcast networks and external book index sources, such as Open Library (Open Library n.d.) and OpenAlex (Priem et al. 2022), to cross-examine our conclusions. Enriched datasets will also enable future investigation into how podcast coverage may reflect or reshape broader book visibility and the roles played by podcasts in academia.