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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

That’s more than I was expecting given the 98% selling less than 5000 referenced in the opening paragraph.

But then again, that 2.6 million books were sold is also more than I expected.

2.6 million would mean 1 in 3000 people on earth, bought at least 1 book in the last year. That doesn't seem very surprising to me?

Although I think you meant to write 27 million (268 * 100k)

edit - ignore, I missed that it was 2.6m unique in the article

I think the 2.6 mil refers to the # of titles available for sale, not the number of copies sold.

Oops I skimmed the article and missed that - thanks.

Somehow I get the feeling that people are dropping qualifiers left and right. For instance the 2.6 million is books sold online. And more importantly I strongly suspect someone somewhere failed to mention this was all U.S. only. At least I suspect it is.

The data is also quite sparse and almost certainly missing a large chunk of the worlds population. Looking at their website, I doubt they’re covering the Chinese domestic market. I’d also be surprised if they’re covering say Bangladesh, or Indian non-English books or content. Same with Indonesia.

That right there would probably throw all the numbers off dramatically world population wise.

I was surprised by how low the reported total number of books is. Then I realised they're only reporting online book sales. However, the number still seems quite low.

Yes, it's only online book sales. NPD book wouldn't give me numbers on print sales. Though I learned in a previous article that print sales tend to be less than online sales.

I see now from up thread, this is 2.6 million individual titles, not actual book sales. To me, this still seems low. Unfortunately, the bookstat website linked in the article won't load for me, but I wonder if that is only the total number of English language titles (sold online).

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