US public EV charging stations

As America has installed more electric vehicle charging stations, it has also produced more self-published books, a correlation that suggests either that people are writing novels while waiting for their cars to charge or that the same technological optimism that drives EV adoption also drives the belief that one's memoir deserves an ISBN. The correlation is 0.959 across nine years, during which both curves rose with the exponential confidence of industries powered by democratized access. Everyone can charge a car now. Everyone can publish a book now. The quality of both varies considerably.

Public EV charging stations grew from about 8,000 in 2010 to over 160,000 by 2021, driven by federal incentives, state mandates, and the expansion of networks like ChargePoint and Tesla Supercharger. Self-published books grew from roughly 150,000 titles per year to over 2 million during the same period, fueled by Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform, which reduced the barrier to publication from years of agent-querying to approximately fifteen minutes of form-filling. Both trends are stories about platform economics: just as charging networks needed to exist before EVs could go mainstream, publishing platforms needed to exist before self-publishing could explode. Both benefited from the same technological infrastructure—cloud computing, mobile apps, and payment processing—that made scaling cheap.

Nine years of charging stations and self-published books growing together is a portrait of a decade in which barriers to entry collapsed across multiple industries simultaneously. The car charges, the book publishes, and the infrastructure that enables both continues to expand. Whether anyone reads the book or uses the charger is, statistically, a separate question entirely.