Soren, of Microformats.dk, has produced a Google Maps mashup to show the birthplaces of the authors whose books are on the list of the top 250 books borrowed from UK libraries. The data for the map comes from The Guardian's Data Store.
If you click on a map marker you will find out the birthplace of the author and their number on the list. Of course some authors, for example Danielle Steel, have more than one book on the list.
Soren says he couldn't discover the birthplaces of Julia Gregson, Mark
Mills and Sam Bourne. They have therefore been added to the map in the sea off England.
As this list is from books borrowed from UK libraries it isn't surprising to see that a large number of authors on the list were born in the UK. What is interesting is that most of the authors from the US originate from the east coast. I also find it rather sad that the British don't seem to have an appetite for texts written in other languages or from non-Western cultures. There aren't many authors on this list who weren't born in English speaking countries.
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