Wait - is this true?

[conuly]

Amazon sales rankings are often used as conditions in author contracts and my independent bookstores to help make purchasing decisions.

If it is, I suppose it makes a sad kind of sense, but shouldn't there be some sort of independent company to work out how likely a book is to sell? This strikes me as a stunningly bad idea for reasons quite beyond the current drama.

Also? A post on metadata and the whole... fail.

Also ALSO? Look at this. Don't mess with teh internetz. CLEARLY.

Comments

[l33tminion]

Amazon is one of the biggest bookstores in the world (if not the biggest). Meddling aside, previous Amazon sales ranks are probably one of the best predictors of future sales companies can get without spending a lot of money on it (at least for authors they haven't dealt with themselves before).

[conuly]

It still seems... I don't know. I mean, it makes sense for exactly the reason you state, but it still seems like it's bound to eventually fail in a big way.

[l33tminion]

Fail for whom, and in what way? It fails to be fair to authors if Amazon starts skewing the system with bias (which has already happened, but may yet be corrected now that there's public attention on the matter). It fails to be profitable for small bookstores and publishing companies if books that sell well on Amazon aren't likely to do well in general (which could happen for a variety of reasons, depending on how Amazon markets their books). If Amazon goes out of business, that would also leave everyone looking for a new set of data, but that would be an obvious problem.

[conuly]

I don't know! It's just a vague feeling that it's a bad idea. If I were actually in business I'd probably ignore that vague feeling, but I'm not, so I get to talk about it.