February 14, 2011
A Reaction to the Times E-Book Best-Seller Lists
Posted by Macy Halford
The Times Book Review really does do a very nice job with whatever it decides to do. And its presentation of the new best-seller lists—all three of them (combined print and e-book, e-book, and—online only—combined hardcover and paperback)—was no exception. We got this pretty graphic that shows us how certain of our favorite books are doing in different formats, and an informative write-up from Jennifer Schuessler that points out some interesting revelations (no one's reading Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside of a Dog” in e-book, apparently, though it’s No. 2 on the paperback non-fiction list).
I sat with the Book Review yesterday at my local coffee shop, and I looked long and hard at the lists, and I waited, as the song goes, for the miracle to come. There are now many, many lists. Because this was a special occasion, I thought I should spend longer than usual parsing them—not from a marketer’s perspective but from a reader’s perspective—allowing them to give up whatever secrets they held.
After half an hour or so, I had to stop, for down that path lies madness. First because the lists do not (on the whole) contain what I want them to; second because the trade-fiction list, which includes many excellent titles, in being set apart from the mass-market-fiction list (and the various non-fiction lists being set apart from each other) seems to me to speak to a collective desire to pretend that our society is more discerning than it is, which is both noble and ignoble; and third because we are not allowed to see numbers. If we were the fantasy mentioned in item two would crumble fast, because “The Lean Belly Prescription” would probably be revealed to have sold a thousand times as many copies as “The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Vol. 1.” We all know this anyway, but the lack of numbers and the separate lists help us to sort of not know it.
None of that has to do with e-books. What I learned from reading the e-book lists is that I do not care what format people read books in. This was somewhat astonishing to me, because I thought I did. But no. I do not care whether people read “The Lean Belly Prescription” on their Kindles or their Nooks or their iPads or in hardcover or in paperback. Or, the only reason I can think to care is that toting around a weighty hardcover burns more calories than toting around a near-weightless Kindle. But you know what really burns calories? Lugging (definitively not toting) around a hardcover copy of “The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Vol. 1.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/02/a-reaction-to-the-times-e-book-best-seller-lists-1.html#ixzz1E3GdZsPD
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