The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong

So then if you have sufficient capital, you park it into your own book for a few weeks and then return it all later once the best-selling status is achieved?

I can't imagine publishers would let this happen more than once or twice before revoking this ability for the seller. Inventory handling is expensive.

To remainder paperbacks, instead of sending the entire book back for credit they'd rip off the covers, send those instead, and dumpster the book. I don't know if they do this anymore. When I grew up in the 80s, I read an enormous number of coverless books:)

I know of one publisher who massively overprinted a title. Most of the run didn't even make it to the stores.

Because of a worker error, the copies were left under a leak in the warehouse roof.

I understand there was an insurance claim. It was all very unfortunate.

I'm not familiar with this, what's the sellers business model then? Consumers easily get full refunds on fakes, no?

Scientology did one better - they bought their own books at retail, then fed them back into the distribution chain. It was common for "new" books to arrive with price tags still on them.

The same thing used to happen in the UK music charts. Sales were tracked in a small number of stores and then interpolated.

So of course record companies and sometimes artists would make sure there were big orders at those stores. And a lot of very bad records became unexpected chart toppers.

Taking your question at face value, yes, and it’s true of every private news company. They are first and foremost entertainers, and even those who hold themselves out as agents of change require a large audience.

Not sure why the downvotes. If a news provider can’t promise to try to tell the truth in a legally binding way, but just claims to be editorializing, it’s no wonder there is so much public distrust of the news.

Read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" if you want to know what motivates media companies. (Spoiler: Advertisers first and foremost)

It applies to nearly every organization that's been advertising itself as news for easily the last 20+ years.

They are all - every last one of them - suddenly nothing but editorial opinion and entertainment as soon as they show up in a courtroom.

> Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of The New York Times Best-Seller List Desk editors based on standards for inclusion that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations.

So basically, they use editorial discretion when ranking bulk sales. Which means they are prone to exclude books they don’t like and include books they do like. Excluding some bulk sales but not others isn’t objective. Institutional and bulk sales should all be excluded from the counts.

Seems unfair to dismiss it that way. Here is the decision, Blatty vs New York Times Company, decided December 29, 1986:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-supreme-court/1843273.html

The Times won on First Amendment (freedom of the press / speech) grounds. Blatty couldn't win, since the list would need to be "of and concerning" him:

> "To begin with, the list does not expressly refer to Blatty or his novel. Nor does he contend otherwise. Quite the contrary: the failure of Legion to appear on the list is the very basis of his action."

Perhaps most interesting for me is that the Times survey of bookstores included a pre-written list of the books they want sales numbers for:

> "To obtain sales figures from bookstores, [the Times] sent to the bookstores forms which [it] prepared; the forms for works of fiction contain and contained a printed list of 36 ‘bestselling’ books which has and had the effect of encouraging reports as to sales of books listed on the forms and discouraging reports as to sales of books not listed on the forms”

WOW, can I ask what the most common genre was?

A lot of influential figures publish their reading lists, like Bill Gates [0], Elon Musk [1], and Patrick Collision [2]

[0]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-201...

[1]: https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-h...

[2]: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf

Browse a book store is the obvious answer.

But this makes sense, because a store will generally buy items that it thinks it can sell, so it'll come down to humans making choices about what's a good book. Of course, publishers will be pushing their latest items through their marketing chains, and so new books will make it to stores based on marketability to the store owner.

In the digital realm, this is less of an issue, and can accept more books, but makes the whole shopping experience very noisy imho.

However, I personally like to read those little recommendation cards that the shop assistants make. I've bought a few books outside my normal genre that way, and haven't been let down yet.

Read quality book reviews. I would especially recommend the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, but there are dozens of long-form journals of this kind.

Most newspapers also have book review sections, as do many academic journals.

Presumably if you're interested in someone or something, you can also simply peruse the internet to see what's out there, i.e. you can start with your interests rather than with what's popular or well-advertised.

By sticking to the classics and letting time act as your filter.

browse goodreads! go to local author talks! go to a local book club ran by someone well-read! totally agree with the above supporting long form review publications like the new york/ london/ paris review of books; they typically will write about a general topic whose sources are 1-3 books that are listed. If the long form piece peaks your interest you know exactly where to dig in for more information.

Best seller lists skew towards "branded" writers typically pushing (in my opinion) a diluted version of an existing thought that is re-marketed for our time. There is nothing new under the sun, so stick to the classics. Life is much too short to read mediocre books. (:

NLP text analysis by NNs to identify features that humans can't perceive but are shared across genres that are liked by the user.

(I'm only half joking - book discovery is a pain point in my life and I fantasize about this every time looking for a new read)

If it's on a bestseller list, it's already discovered. It's also going to be pushed by every book retailer.

Despite the obvious conflict of interest, you can get pretty far by talking to bookshop staff. They’re around the books all day, so it’s pretty much inevitable they’ll leaf through them and form their own opinions.

I find Goodreads recommendations pretty good, which are presumably based on a souped-up version of "people who liked $YOUR_LAST_BOOK also liked X".

Oddly enough, that's not been my problem for some sime now. Note that I largely read nonfiction....

1. Find a topic of interest.

2. Start reading at some arbitrary entry point, though generally favour texts with references.

3. Branch from there.

- Find the authors you most respect / who most make you think, and read their publications, and track down their sources and references, or where they're cited. Notes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, and citation indices are gold.

- Find the topics, questions, ideas, methods within the topic that you're most interested in and drill down on those.

- If you find yourself needing new skills in the course of explorations, pick up on those.

- Don't hesitate to ask for recommendations.

- If there's a concept that seems unclear, chase that down to its origins, and trace variants as the concept evolves

- Incidental histories and biographies can often provide further illumination.

- Eventually you should start constructing your ow structure or modle of the field or space (or subsets / components of it/them). This can further drive your exploration.

I think the key is looking for longevity. A book at the top of a bestseller list for a week is a mere blip. Books start catching my attention when I seem them out there for about 3 months- its not some flash in the pan or selling just because the author previously wrote a good book. Around 6 months, you start getting stuff that is almost certainly going to at least be entertaining. If something has been on the list a year or more, this is likely going to be a thought provoking book and something highly enjoyable. This scale has never really let me down- except maybe in the case of The Alchemist. That was such a miss and the language just so... vapid... that I actually downloaded a copy off the internet just to see if I got a bootleg mistranslated version or something. I read tons of books, 99/100+ times a book on the NYTimes Bestseller list for more than 6 months has been worth its time to read.

I guess the joke wasn’t clear enough: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/a...