I’m assuming it means mentioned as a post. I know I’ve personally seen Cal Newport’s, Deep Work mentioned in the comments at least a dozen times.

If you click through any of the links, you'll see the actual comments listed.

The thing all those comments have in common? They contain Amazon links.

I prefer this list: https://hackernewsbooks.com/

Thanks for link. But the selection seemed very odd. I wondered how they got that list from HN. The site says

All links to Amazon, Safaribooks and O'Reilly get extracted once a week from Hacker News posts, make sure they are indeed books and then rank them based on how often they are mentioned and the karma of the user.

Ahh. I guess that's it - people don't bother giving Amazon/other links for well-known books. Or sometimes the book has its own website.

Also, that site makes money by linking to Amazon. That seems a bit dodgy to me!

Hmm is it really that hard to extract book titles that aren't links to Amazon/publishers? C'mon hackers! :-)

The most mentioned book all year was really only mentioned 7 times?

Probably not. Most likely, the algorithm used for determine a "mention" isn't very smart.

Sort of defeats the point, right? Why not just call it "Top 10 books on Amazon linked to from HN"

As far as I can tell, it considers only links to Amazon.

According to HN search, SICP was mentioned >5000 times over the past year: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sicp&sort=byPopularity&prefix=...

So I'm guessing the number for 2017 was similar.