The New York Times bestseller lists and the USA Today Top 150 have included eBook sales for several weeks now, and following those lists as we have (in order to put together our weekly Most Wanted Mashup), has led to some interesting observations.
Early in the year, the sales of eBooks seemed to take USA Today by surprise when they noted in the first week of January that digital versions of the top six titles sold more copies than their print versions. USA Today’s approach is to combine print and eBook sales into one number and rank titles by total number of sales, but when it comes to marking format, whichever sold more copies is listed as the format. So if the ebook sold more than the print book, it’s listed as an eBook, and the ISBN will be the digital ISBN.
The New York Times began tracking eBooks by early February, and has taken a different approach. The Times now has 22 bestseller lists: Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Nonfiction, Advice and Miscellaneous Hardcover, Advice and Miscellaneous Paperback, Business Hardback, Business Paperback, Trade Paperback Fiction, Mass Market Paperback Fiction, Paperback Nonfiction, Children’s Picture Books, Children’s Chapter Books, *Children’s Paperback Books, *Children’s Series, Graphic Books Hardcover, Graphic Books Paperback, Manga, E-Book Fiction, E-Book Nonfiction, Combined Print Fiction, Combined Print Nonfiction…and the Combined Print and E-Book Fiction, and Print and E-Book Nonfiction, though with the following caveat: “E-book sales are tracked for fiction and general nonfiction titles. E-book sales for advice & how-to books, children’s books, and graphic books will be tracked at a future date.” (Note: YA is included in Children’s Paperback and Children’s Series, with no separate category, which seems odd considering the astounding popularity of YA books.)
Got that?
The Publishers Weekly bestseller lists had been running a week behind their competitors until recently, when they seem to have caught up, but they don’t track eBooks, and seem to be very similar to the New York Times lists. The Publishers Weekly lists do have one unique feature—they cover audiobooks.
We’ve been struggling for awhile now with how to make the most sense of the lists in a quick, easily understandable way every Monday morning. Here are some of the questions we struggled with: Should we ignore eBooks and concentrate on print? Should we use combined sales? Should we do breakdowns? Should we include audio?
What we came up with is this:
Then, of course, there are other bestseller lists as well, by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other specialty lists like the Christian Bookseller’s Association lists.
So what would be most useful for librarians? When you come in to work at the beginning of the week, what do you need to know?
Here’s what we have decided to do. Instead of the Most Wanted Mashup as we’ve been doing it in the past, we’ll do a mashup of links to the best lists for different purposes, and concentrate on titles that are new to the lists.
So what you’ll see beginning next week is various links such as Bestselling Audiobooks, Bestselling Mysteries, Bestselling All Formats, etc. We will link each of these categories to what we believe to be the best source for those particular breakdowns.
In the meantime, we will continue to highlight, in the Monday Run Down, titles that have just arrived on the lists in the past week. We hope this information will be helpful and save time for busy RA librarians.
Please let us know what you think.
