November 2026
Spare
Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex
Bantam Press · 416 pp
The Curve
39%
Lost the room
2 readers
Bring someone
Pass the figure on.
It travels better than a review, because it is not one. Send it to somebody who had an opinion about this book and never opened it.
“2 of us read Spare at The Ironic Book Club and got 39% of the way through, on average. The one book statistic nobody else publishes:”
The selection note
Ghostwritten by J R Moehringer, who is credited on the acknowledgements page rather than the jacket. The credit is the part we want to look at.
Where everybody stopped
- 2
- Readers logged
- 0%
- Still going at halfway
- 161
- Median page
- 0%
- Finished it
of 416
The biggest single fall was between 30% and 40% — around page 125.
What it was made of
Still worth reading it yourself
Where
What it is
What they get
We get
Your local library
Free, and the authors are still paid per borrow. There is no catch here.
Free
They getA loan recorded against the authors under Public Lending Right
We getNothing
Your actual local bookshop
Walk in and ask. They will order it by Tuesday.
The high street
They getAll of it
We getNothing
Bookshop.org UK
The rare link where the good option and the lucrative option are the same option. We would love to claim credit for that.
Independent
They getA matching 10% into the independent bookshop pool
We get10%
Hive
Online, and an independent shop still gets paid. Name one at the checkout.
Independent
They getA cut to an independent bookshop you choose
We getNothing
Waterstones
Click and collect from the one on your high street, if it is still there.
A chain of bookshops
They getA chain, but a chain of bookshops
We getNothing
Blackwell's
Oxford's own. Reliably has the odd edition the others do not.
A chain of bookshops
They getFree UK delivery, since 1879
We getNothing
Kobo
Log the page your reader shows and the last page of your edition. The figure copes.
Ebook
They getAn ebook, readable on anything that is not a Kindle
We getNothing
Audible
An audiobook. Log where you stopped in hours; the Curve counts those too.
Audiobook
They getThe rest, to Amazon, by another door
We getNothing
World of Books
Second-hand. Nobody involved in publishing it earns a penny.
Second-hand
They getA second-hand copy stays out of a skip
We getNothing
AbeBooks
Second-hand, from an actual bookseller. Owned by Amazon, which it would rather you did not dwell on.
Second-hand
They getA second-hand bookseller somewhere in the country
We getNothing
eBay
Second-hand, from somebody who already stopped on a page. There is a joke in there.
Second-hand
They getWhoever finished it, or gave up on it
We getNothing
Amazon
Listed because pretending you have not considered it would be silly.
The big one
They getThe rest, to the second-largest company on earth
We getUp to 4.5%