[Xanthe]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Unfortunately for the reviewers, their readers are not mindless automatons who follow orders.

And really, there's no reason to be so patronizing of people who buy best-sellers. Unless you're reading Kritik der reinen Vernunft for the 20th time and writing your own English translation, I doubt your tastes are anywhere near as impressive as you think they are. Sorry.

Oh, I don't think that all followers of the reviewers are mindless automatons. My point was that a lot of people read the books because they are on the list and they think that they should read those books to be au courant.

My point about the list is not that my taste in books is so elevated or impressive (it isn't at all - quite the contrary in fact ). I think that what turns up on the bestseller list is usually quite predictable, rather than being special. There is a handful of big-name novelists whose books will automatically appear on the bestseller list just because their fans auto-buy their books without even reading the blurbs about them. Usually there will be a generational saga. Usually there'll be a novel about a family in crisis with either a spouse/parent/child dying of some dread disease, or some slice-of-life book. Usually there'll be a novel about a woman or a man in a mid-life crisis, betrayed/divorced by a spouse who has moved on, estranged from their children or family, etc. There'll be some estoeric novel translated from another language. Maybe there will be a thinly disguised autobiography. I take issue with the idea that there is some sort of cachet to reading a book that is on a bestseller list. I don't think that anyone here can truthfully say that they don't know someone who reads books on those lists for just that reason.

I find interesting the defensive tone people are taking toward those of us who are dismissing the inordinate value being placed on the bestseller lists, by trying to apply the label of elitist to us. You, for example, immediately jumped to the erroneous conclusion that I must think that my reading tastes are more impressive than others.

Yeah, that doesn't tell you anything about readership rates either. Downloading a book for free requires minimal effort, thus produces minimal commitment, thus zero necessity on the part of the reader to finish it. High download/seed/etc rates are just another mark of popularity.

I've found in the ebook sections of the Dark Web that the people there are not into the download/seed rate popularity mindset. I think that you are confusing them with the movie and music uploaders, where being the first is a badge of pride. First of all, most of the sites that even make ebooks available are usually more community oriented, with low emphasis on seeding and more of an commitment to making books available, not to mention an interest about spreading the word about favorite or obscure authors. Downloading a book for free requires just about as much effort as downloading one that you've bought - lol - virtually no effort at all. Might even take longer if you're doing it via torrent and waiting for seeders to show up. Those who tend to download ebooks are, for the most part, people who love to read, and have been reading and buying books all of their lives. So I would say that they have just as much commitment to read the books as anyone else.

Getting a book via the Dark Net doesn't mean that the person is less likely to read it. I think that the popularity of a book on the Dark Net might actually be more indicative of its value, since it's not being influenced as much by marketing strategies and instead more by word-of-mouth. A lot of people who do upload books take the time and effort to convert them into multiple formats, create TOC's, correct errors, etc. People don't usually invest that kind of time and effort for books they don't read themselves.