Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
This effect showed up quite a while ago in other markets. When the record business switched from survey-style data collection to barcode based data collection, they suddenly discovered that  country music outsold good old rock and roll by a substantial margin. Even though the survey-based data had been saying otherwise for years. Seems likely that the same effect may be going on in the book bestseller lists too.
Xenophon |
I do remember how wrong the survey method was as opposed to the sound scan system at the time. However, if I remember the numbers correctly(and it has been a long time), sound scan showed that there were about 50% more country albums than rock albums in the billboard top 100, but that three times as many rock albums were sold as country albums. Which is a very interesting statistic itself.
As for an e-book bestseller list, I'm of two minds about it. On the positive side, it does seem to validate e-books as medium worth paying attention to. On the negative side, it also has the potential to ghettoize ebooks, if they are relegated to their own bestseller list and not counted in the other sales lists.
I mean, if I'm looking for a bestselling NY Times book, I'd like to know how it ranks among *all* books, and not just among e-books.
Right now, the NY Times distinguishes among hardbacks, paperbacks, (with lists for fiction and nonfiction), plus children's books and graphic novels (and maybe I've left out a category). This is a reasonable division, as these are generally separate categories (even though a book could be in both hardback and paperback fiction, this happens so rarely that I don't think the categories can be said to compete with each other. But this is not true of e-books: they compete with both categories, and having a separate list will make the other lists less useful for people looking to buy a popular book.
Of course, an e-book isn't really a hardback or paperback, either. If I were designing the list, I would have a "Hardcover" (including ebooks) and "Paperback" (including ebooks) list. If a book were only in hardback, I would attribute all e-book sales to the hardback list. Once the book came out in paper back, I would attribute all e-book sales to the paperback list. Of course there can also be a separate e-book bestseller list.
The reason for this, again, is to prevent a situation under which a certain hardback loses the opportunity to be the No. 1 bestseller on the NY Times hardback list (which is the most prestigious list) because a lot of people bought it in e-book format. Including e-book sales in the hardback list is just as valuable for people looking to buy the hardback as it is for people looking to buy the e-book.