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by Mithaldu 4054 days ago
Basic statistics. There are two factors at work here that obscure the real data:

1. The data is smoothed. Set the smoothing to 0 to see the real data.

2. The data is not absolute, but relative (note it's %) to the entire body of data Google has available for that year. The further back you go, the less overall data is available. I suspect strongly that the spikes you see are merely years where very few books overall are available.