Melanie Walsh writes: “After the first lockdown in March 2020, I went looking for book sales data, only to find that most of it is proprietary and purposefully locked away. What I learned was that the single most influential data in the publishing industry—which, every day, determines book contracts and authors’ lives—is basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the industry. And I learned that this is a big problem. If we want to understand the contemporary literary world, we need better book data. And we need this data to be free, open, and interoperable.”