

Are the bestseller lists made up? - davidw
http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/2007/10/are-the-bestsel.html

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Xichekolas
Does anyone here actually look at the NYT Best Sellers List to pick their
reading material?

I have always treated it more as a Never-Read-This List. Frankly anything that
sells that well is probably some empty self-help drivel or the equivalent to a
blockbuster movie, neither of which will ever change your life or say anything
insightful.

Of course, I'm also the guy that is waiting until the Harry Potter fad is dead
and gone before I even start reading those books. Mainly because I hate
fanboys, and especially pop culture fanboys.

~~~
jamiequint
Really?!

So you would not have read The Tipping Point, The World is Flat, How to Win
Friends and Influence People, and other seminal business works. You would have
missed some great memoirs, books about current leaders that might be useful in
making valuable decisions on who to elect to lead our country, and a hell of a
lot of well written history; all for the sake of being different.

~~~
davidw
<plug plug plug> Maybe he would have got the gist of some of them from
Squeezed Books. Big Idea books are often padded a lot to turn a 10 page idea
into a book. </plug plug plug>

~~~
jamiequint
I believe in reading the whole books because when you read an entire book you
remember the gist of it even weeks or months later, but if you read a summary
(unless you really memorize it) you hardly remember much of anything after a
few weeks.

~~~
davidw
That's an interesting observation, and not something I'd thought of.

My hope with the site is to balance out the 'lesser involvement' that comes
with not buying and reading a book, with discussions of books so that people
can discuss the application and nuances of the Big Idea, especially as it
applies to their own lives. I'm not getting much traction with that though, so
far.

~~~
jamiequint
I can see how that would be valuable in some cases.

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dfranke
Fascinating, but the FT article is not much more than a linkjack. Why not just
link to [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/the-new-
york...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/the-new-york-ti.html)

~~~
davidw
Good point. Mostly because I like Tim Harford, am happy that he's writing an
online journal, and was too lazy to click on the link. Seth Godin does just
fine at promoting himself, in any case.

