Hacker News Reader

Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

Why is this so highly upvoted ? this is just a standard best seller list, for books. What's so interesting about it ?

Seems like Amazon is trying to replace every book's "NY Times Bestseller" with "Amazon Bestseller"? Another move by Amazon to more deeply penetrate consumer culture with a quick hack.

The NYT Bestseller list is human curated instead of just ranking the raw sales numbers.[1]

If the Amazon ranking is based on pure order count[2], Amazon Charts would be an interesting alternative list. It can't fully "replace" the NYT list because I assume many readers want that newspaper's editorial filtering.

[1] https://booklaunch.com/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times-an...

Good question, and just like any chart...ahem, Billboard...I'm initially skeptical about the integrity of the methodology. As in, there are lots of reasons to fudge numbers or engage in marketing tactics rather than straight factual reporting. Caveat Emptor.

This can't be new can it? I assumed something like this had been out for a while; maybe novel because it's weekly?

This front-end is new, but they've been crunching sales hourly for each category for over a decade. They've made the bestseller list both more prominent and less specific (you can infer less data from these charts than you could by tracking Zeitgeist lists).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com