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Comment by frogpelt | Hacker News Reader

It's more interesting to me that people are picking the books they want to read by looking at a list of what everyone else wants to read.

With fiction, that makes some sense to me. (Although, if I hate vampire books why would I care that a million people bought them last month?)

With nonfiction, it doesn't make sense at all. If you are interested in a topic, look for a book about it. If you aren't interested in the topic, why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?

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Jumping on the "why nonfiction?" bandwagon, most popular nonfiction books aren't "A Deep Look At The Mathematics Of Widgets, With Special Attention to Foozles, For The Reader Well-Versed In Chrono-Widget-Dynamics". Most nonfiction books are "A Gentle Introduction To Widgets, With Many Wonderful And Heartwarming Anecdotes, For People With No Particular Need For Any Real Understanding".

Think "Born to Run", or "1421".

Second, not all nonfiction books are true and correct accounts of science and history. That gives them quite a bit of leeway for being exciting and enjoyable.

Third, there is actually a nonfiction audience. Some people don't like fiction They just can't bring themselves to care about the lives and deeds of people who don't exist. Then again, you can only do so much focused, specialized reading on a single topic like astronomy or Russian history unless your brain is broken in that special way that makes you a fantastic researcher. So there is a large audience of people who relax by reading an essentially random nonfiction book on a topic they know nothing about simply because it's supposed to be an enjoyable read. And best seller lists are good places to find enjoyable reads.

You have a great point about fluffy feely goody low effort broader appeal sell. I enjoyed Born to Run, but not sure how deeper one can go on barefoot running; he had a good story, anthropol-culture tie in with smatterings of kinesio-podiatric science. Sure seller! Irrationally predict that :-) Here's to gooey non-fiction with all the recent expert studies neatly conclusive in one $9.99 package.

> why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?

Maybe the author has something to do with it? :) People like good books, and good books make dull topics seem interesting.

A good author can make a dry topic really interesting. "The Other God" for instance--how many people are going to be interested in a book about the history of dualist religion? But it turns out to be a real page-turner.

A good author can apply their skills in a surprising area and create a very interesting book. For instance, "The Cleanest Race" isn't just about North Korea, it's also about doing comparative analysis on propaganda. To me, this doesn't make the topic narrower, it makes it broader. People like me who aren't interested in comparative analysis find out it's an interesting tool when applied to something I'm interested in, and I imagine if you were the other way around you'd enjoy the book too.

I found out about "The Rise of Christianity" from a Catholic friend of mine, and now it's one of my favorite books, despite not being a Christian. The author took a pretty dry topic (the early history of Christianity) and made it interesting by applying modern sociology and anthropology to it. That he writes well and comes to interesting conclusions makes it a good book.

I think it makes more sense within a category/genre. Once you are looking for say books on programming language x, have a way to select the books which are most popular is definitely valuable, and even better if you can select the books which are most popular with a certain population that you respect or with particular people you respect in that area. Perhaps publishers will transition away from providing channel access to recommendation and search engines. I suppose with Amazon taking over you could say this transition has already started but it has a long way to go yet.

I work with a lot of publishers and they're still frozen, looking at the headlights rapidly approaching, and unsure which way to jump. One thing is for sure though - paper media (ephemeral or books) is going to be massively disrupted over the next decade, and this disruption is only just beginning, everyone can see this but its hard to see exactly which way this is going. My personal bet is that the web will take over completely from all these paper products, and be served on all sorts of devices, but making money on that content is far from a sure thing.

why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?

Not feeling left out, conversational one-upsmanship (upspersonship?), being able to intelligently banter with strangers who are reading the same thing (since it's so popular), ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7VgNQbZdaw

LMAO, thank you very much, made my day

Didja watch?

> With nonfiction, it doesn't make sense at all.

That is the opposite of what I'd think. Nonfiction includes current topics like books on political figures. Fiction is all over the map and, with the exception of crossover titles like Primary Colors that were about current political figures but written as fiction, typically isn't tied to a current event in such a way that it matters what week it was on the NY times bestseller list for others to see that they might want to read it and buy it.

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Offtopic: everyone reading this stuff up here- scroll down to Tim O'Reilly's comment below before you jump on the O'Reilly bashing train.

Off-topic only regarding the "self-publish or not" question. O'Reilly's comments should be required reading for anyone planning to jump on the "O'Reilly bashing train".

Some of the things he said made sense though. Basically, if this guy wanted such rigid requirements, he should have stuck with a high-end custom publishing house. O'Reilly has never tried to make its name synonymous with a quality publishing house; they are known because they gave a voice to smart people in the tech world. Since then, it has expanded, mostly because techs no longer buy books in print as much as they did, and because to be profitable in a down market, you have to cut corners. The problem that plagued this author is that he associated the O'Reilly name with "high design quality" and that just isn't true. O'Reilly should be used when you want a recognizable publisher for tech books and to be included in their collection. If you are smart, you will also use the standard cover with an animal on it, such as a chinchilla.

I happen to have hard data on why people buy books from Bowker/Nielson. So online 3.5% of people buy a book because it is on the best seller list, but offline the number is 5% and being a best seller list is important offline because that means the book will actually be in the store so it can be bought. The best seller lists are important but not to the degree they were a few years ago.

> With nonfiction, it doesn't make sense at all. If you are interested in a topic, look for a book about it.

I think it is more complicated than that. I am interested in many topics, but at many different degrees of interest, and I don't have time to look for high-quality books on all of them, especially the lesser ones. However, I may see a book on a bestseller list that happens to coincide with one of those interests, especially one that I haven't read much on recently, and it may make me interested in reading that book when I might not have come across it otherwise.

(Edit: I realize high-quality != popular, but it's often a reasonable proxy for casual interests.)

>If you aren't interested in the topic, why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?

Most bestselling non-fiction falls into the popsci category. Think: *A brief History of Nearly Everything, Freakonomics, Blink, Tipping Point, etc. So by all means, people who want something slightly factier than a novel while still being accessible might well turn to thed non-fiction bestseller list.

If you are interested in a topic and you find a number of titles through casual browsing, how do you decide which one to try first? It's popularity with the general public may be a factor you consider.

That is the purpose of HN.

I feel like you're making an unfair comparison between fiction and non-fiction.

But isn't fiction the same as nonfiction? I don't only read a small set of nonfiction books that come from a pointed search on a single subject. I read what is interested and related to my fields of interest (which is identical to what I do with fiction).

Either the fiction results will suck ("People who like Fantasy also like Harry Potter -- have you tried it?" i.e. not targeted to the subgenre and thus useless) or nonfiction results are possible.

The take home is this: Have a more granular ability to present social lists for both fiction and non-fiction.

If you can detect what type of fiction I like based on others, you can do the same for non-fiction. You can tell that I like certain subjects and people who share those likes might have some overlap that I would also enjoy.

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