What Do Amazon's "Editors" Know?

Well, it's difficult to say...

But as you no doubt know, everyone is coming out with their Best Books lists, and this has made The BookHarpie wonder if they are worth a dingo's kidney.

Since The BookHarpie is lazy, a simple list from Amazon's 2008 selections was chosen to analyze. Below you will find the Top 10 Middle Readers, with additional data.

Now about that data. # of Rev's is the number of reviews that were written by Amazon Customers. If you notice there is somewhat of a correlation between that number and sales. (The BookHarpie leaves it to others to quantify that relationship.) Star Rating is self explanatory. Range, in this case, refers to the lowest and highest Rating. For example, there was no variance for "Our White House" and "A Thousand Never Evers". Both of these books got 5-Stars; while most of the other books had Ratings that ranged from 1 to 5. Apparently there is no correlation between this phenomena and sales.

Finally, Sales is the Sales Rank on Amazon. Note that Amazon is most annoying in that it has no overall sales figure for any particular book in all it's manifestations -- at least not one it is willing to share. Consequently, The BookHarpie has chosen THE most successful version of the book. Granted, not the best statistical course to take, but The BookHarpie did say it was lazy. And this seemed fairer than using the worst sales figure.

Now, The Harpie will leave it to every adult to draw their own conclusions from this smattering of data, but what is apparent to The BookHarpie is that Actual People did not read the Amazon's Editors list before making their purchases. If you exclude the D'uh Choices, like the Wimpy Kid and Beedle books, Amazon Editors did not do that well with their guesses. Their first choice, for example, did not even rate that well with the people who read it. And only two of three of their choices were unanimously praised with only 4- and 5- Stars. (Unfortunately for the publishers, high ratings don't necessarily correspond that well to sales.)

However, having said that, the overall Ratings were rather good. So in that case, we might conclude that these mysterious editors can at least recognize a good book when they read one. They did list some that at least some people thoroughly enjoyed.


Concluding: All I can say is that if I was going to be purchasing books for pubescent hormone crazed individuals, that I would take Amazon's 2009 List with a grain of salt. A starting place, but one which one should approach with caution.


Expect more detrita for your perusal in the future. And yes, we might get back to that Vine thing.