BETWEEN THE LINES

Book Talk by Joe


Bestseller Lists - Do They Tell Us Anything Useful?

It used to be pretty simple to find out what books were the current bestsellers. All you had to do was buy a Sunday New York Times and turn to its weekly bestseller list.

Now, there are almost as many bestseller lists as there are books (an admitted exaggeration by this writer).

In addition to the venerable NYT list, we now have the USA Today list, the Wall Street Journal list, the Amazon.com list, the Barnesandnoble.com list, the Powells.com list, the Publishers Weekly list, the Booksense list, not to mention the myriad of regional bestseller lists published each week in newspapers throughout the United States.

What makes all of this interesting is that most of the major bestseller lists have very few books in common. This is partly due to the different sources of sales data that they use, i.e., how they gather book sales information and whether or not they weight any of this data in determining how the books are ranked.
For example, the NYT gathers its information from large chain stores, department stores, supermarkets and a select list of independent bookstores. The Wall Street Journal only uses large chain store data, with no independent bookstores included. Booksense, on the other hand, uses only independent bookstore data. And the various on-line outlets only use their own sales data.

All of the bestseller lists are very secretive about their ranking process, which leaves them open to the charge that they might manipulate some of the data to get the results they desire. Many suspect that the NYT list contains more literary fiction than other lists in order to reinforce the perception that readers of that newspaper are more erudite than the rest of us.

And, how do you explain that The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown has been in the top 10 of almost every list since it was published 3 years ago? That's some 150 weeks for a $24.95 hardcover! Can there possibly be that many people left who have not yet read it, enough people to continue buying it in quantities large enough to keep it on the bestseller lists?

So what does all of this mean? Probably not much. But avid book readers still love to peruse the various bestseller lists and mentally tick off all of the titles they have already read, while making a note to look for the unread titles on the next visit to their local bookstore.