[PuppyTailWags]

BookScan isn't a reliable source of information unfortunately. It only counts when a book's ISBN is physically scanned over a scanner (no ebook, audio book, libraries, specialty sales, etc) and also only covers 75% of retail in general. Generally, you can bet BookScan largely undercounts by a very wide margin.

[Taniwha]

The above numbers are from her response in the comments in the original article, it's worth reading that to understand how those numbers are made up, she explains in depth

[FalconSensei]

I would be interested to see kindle data for self-published

[onlyrealcuzzo]

The majority of books written don't even get published - so the majority of books are definitely read by less than 12 people.

[mannykannot]

This way of looking at it might justify the statistic, but at the cost of making it uninteresting.

[repsilat]

Interesting enough to me, and pretty relevant to a claim like "book-writing is rarely commercially worthwhile". No "points scored" against the publishing industry, but point-scoring is for shallow people.

For publishing, I wonder how many copies of little-bought books are read, and how many are printed -- both probably quite different to the number sold. And I also wonder how the outcome distribution compares to venture capital outcomes, and what predictor variables are useful. "Harry Potter" is a famous case of prediction being difficult (or at least badly done?) but you can probably get some signal from author (writing history, other celebrity), genre.

[ClumsyPilot]

what counts as a book? If a book thats not published is a book, what about a collec5uon of my notes and memoirs on my blog. It got read by loads of people, should it count to the statistics?

[sidlls]

This ambiguity around what a book is seems like an artificial one. Go to a bookstore or view the catalog in Apple Books. Those are books, even the $0.99 micro stories one might find on, e.g., Kindle. Anything else might be a book, but probably not in a way that is useful or constructive to analyze in the context of sales.

[manv1]

A sample of 75% of retail sales is a substantially larger sample than, say, the estimates by the US Census.

If you believe that BookScan isn't reliable, then you also have to believe that the US Census data is totally crap.