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There were many useful facts that I hadn't considered, to be honest, especially regarding what was counted (probbly print sales tracked by BookScan) and how (unique ISBNs). Also, whenever some party brings up stats to make some point, I think it's fair to examine their figures, methodology and so on and just be a bit pedantic about it. And this was a claim made in a major antitrust case. The facts, and the general pedantry, show some serious likely issues and raise some important questions about the figures a party in a major trial made, and which were then - mostly uncritically - echoed all over the place. Regarding Kristen McLeans comment: The "in their dataset" is a very important detail that shouldn't be overlooked. The dataset for this is the book sales figures of the top 10 publisher published books. They get the numbers from partnered retailers (some 75% of retailers according to the article), and it only covers print copies, not ebooks, not audio books. It does not cover direct sales to larger organizational buyers, like library systems, either. And it's grouped by unique ISBN, not by title. As the article points out, most books come in many editions (hardcover, paperback, etc), each of which has their own ISBN. The article author illustrates this by telling about his own book, which is one book with 4 different unique ISBNs (though one was for an ebook, and one for the audio book, both of which wouldn't be covered by this dataset anyway). |