The folks at Worldmapper just published The Atlas Of The Real World, a book of cartograms, distortions of land area according to a variety of interesting data. For example, the above map is a visualization of how many new book titles are published annually in each part of the world. The Creative Review blog posted several fascinating sample maps from the book. From the description of the Books Published cartograms:
"Each new book published is counted only once on this map, regardless of how many copies it sells… A book is defined as having at least 50 pages; a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages. Publications with fewer than 5 pages are not shown on this map. Worldwide, about a million new book titles were published in 1999, with the largest numbers published in the United Kingdom, China and Germany. Overall, the map is dominated by Western Europe, which is home to a number of well established publishing houses."
The Atlas Of The Real World (Amazon), Sample maps at CR Blog (Creative Review)
