I noted in my 2014 “questions” post that I wanted to do a breakdown of Light Novel sales as compared to the reception of anime adaptations. I also noted that myanimelist kept the data, but in weekly posts that were archived on myanimelist’s news forum, a place so organized that 2009 threads will often be bumped up to 2011, with a search function that only displays a max of 30 or so posts and adds about 20 seconds to the collection of every datapoint by pointing you to the last post made in each thread. This is no fault of dtshyk, Snowical, and symbv, the mal news people who have done a straight up excellent job of keeping LN (and manga) data on a weekly basis for nearly 5 years now. Many thanks to them for keeping the data archived in a retrievable and easy to understand format.
Since I don’t have much else in terms of data to crunch until February ends, I decided to see what I could do with that. After taking down data for 3 of the 16 series in my 2011 sample, I realized that individually going through the forums and looking for the release weeks was inefficient as all get out, so I decided to just make a master text file for each year’s worth of data and wash my hands of people bumping a post 2 years into the future to point out how happy they were that Katekyoshi Hitman Reborn was on the manga list. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make these collections available as I finish them. As far as I’ve searched, there’s no other English-language site that archives these data in a convenient format. And if there is, well, redundancy is always nice.
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