
Top 20 Most Sold and Most Read Books of the Week - happy-go-lucky
https://www.amazon.com/charts
======
oneeyedpigeon
It says something about how my impression of Amazon has changed over the
years, but when I first saw that headline, I thought this was going to be a
competitor for Google Charts.

~~~
jknoepfler
I was really hoping for some kind of replacement for the god-awful Cloudwatch
dashboards, which AWS doesn't even use internally because they are borderline
useless (source, worked in AWS and built many dashboards)

~~~
benologist
I was really hoping it would be 7 new SDKs and 65 new billing metrics.

------
1wheel
Amazon tracks what & when you read on kindle but doesn't share that
information with you. I wrote a little script that extracts and visualizes
your reading history:

\- [http://roadtolarissa.com/kindle-tracker/](http://roadtolarissa.com/kindle-
tracker/)

\- [https://github.com/1wheel/kindle-
tracker](https://github.com/1wheel/kindle-tracker)

------
MattSayar
"Oh, the Places You Go" being in the top twenty sold reminded me that it's
graduation season.

I feel silly for initially underestimating the amount of overlap between the
Most Sold books and Most Read books. I assumed the Most Sold would be more
pretentious than the Most Read books. Still surprised there's not at least one
Danielle Steele (or equivalent) in Most Read

~~~
mynameisvlad
There's also a slight difference in between the most sold and read lists --
sold is all books (Kindle, physical, bulk buys, etc) while read is Kindle-only
(because there'd be no way for Amazon to know you read a physical book except
self-reported through Goodreads)

It could account for a few of the discrepancies, too. I'd expect "Oh, the
Places You'll Go" is most likely going to be physical purchases for graduates,
so I wouldn't expect it to show up in read even if all the grads read their
copies.

~~~
Godel_unicode
Minor quible: most read is Kindle and audible ("into the water" was heard more
often than read).

~~~
mynameisvlad
Oooh good catch, I missed it on my quick scan. I'd love to be able to break it
down more than just Fiction/Nonfiction into listening vs hearing, various
sources, etc.

------
petra
Why is this so highly upvoted ? this is just a standard best seller list, for
books. What's so interesting about it ?

~~~
hbosch
Seems like Amazon is trying to replace every book's "NY Times Bestseller" with
"Amazon Bestseller"? Another move by Amazon to more deeply penetrate consumer
culture with a quick hack.

~~~
jasode
The NYT Bestseller list is human curated instead of just ranking the raw sales
numbers.[1]

If the Amazon ranking is based on pure order count[2], Amazon Charts would be
an interesting alternative list. It can't fully "replace" the NYT list because
I assume many readers want that newspaper's editorial filtering.

[1] [https://booklaunch.com/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times-
an...](https://booklaunch.com/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times-and-wall-
street-journal-bestseller-lists/#022117)

[2] possibly related: [http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-things-people-dont-know-
amazo...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-things-people-dont-know-amazons-
bestsellers-rank-sales-rank/)

------
VuWall-Matt
Wow, I guess I'm both surprised and not surprised to see the Harry Potter
series in 5 of the 20 top read fiction spots.

~~~
TillE
What's up with Order of the Phoenix in the highest spot, though? I thought it
was easily one of the worst of the series, and Goodreads ratings more or less
agree with me, ranking only Chamber of Secrets lower.

~~~
carrier_lost
I think it's the best of the series, but I find that when conversation turns
to Harry Potter, I'm often alone in my view.

~~~
TremendousJudge
weird, basically everyone I know says it's the best in the series

~~~
thaumasiotes
Count me in the "worst" bucket. I liked the first four books (and, oddly, the
sixth).

------
dmix
Having done analysis on Amazon books sales I'm very surprised they decided to
filter out harlequin style romance novels. They are easily the top selling
Kindle category.

~~~
ballenf
Makes a lot of sense. The last thing Amazon would want is for Kindles to
become known as smut readers.

And it's the last thing Kindle-owning smut readers would want.

So, a win-win, right?

Having seen a few romance novel reader's Kindle suggestions, Amazon isn't shy
about promoting the genre to the right audience.

~~~
Consultant32452
The knowledge that they're censoring the list is big for me. Especially since
they don't appear to even acknowledge it. Instead of being an honest look at
what people find enjoyable to read, how can I trust it to be anything other
than purely manufactured marketing? These are the top 20 most read books! (out
of the 20 books we were willing to put on this list)

~~~
freehunter
They don't show adult novelties on their main website either, you have to dig
and search for them. Many companies censor adult items. I would fully expect
they would keep sexually explicit or pornographic books off of the list.

~~~
Consultant32452
It's not that I have a problem with them keeping sexually explicit books off
the list. The problem is that the criteria for filtering is not disclosed.
Therefore the list cannot be "trusted" in the sense that it can be believed to
be displaying what it says it's displaying. In fact, we know at least in one
sense it's not displaying what it claims to display.

------
thr0waway1239
Love the title of Neil Degrasse Tyson's book "Astrophysics for People in a
Hurry". So apt for today's readers.

Maybe "for people in a hurry" will become the new "for dummies" franchise? I
did a quick search on Amazon for the quoted phrase, there are very few books
with that title (although someone called Lynda Hudson seems to have cashed in
on the phrase).

------
inputcoffee
Every new iteration of book charts completely mixes up my intuitions on which
books are there, how long they stay, and how contemporary they are.

For instance, I thought after Bill Gates tweeted his regard for Pinker's
Better Angels book, that would be in the top. I would not have expected
"Nudge" to be there, but not (for instance) one of Gladwell's books or
Freakonomics.

Fiction wise, I can see the effect that TV and movies exert but, with the
exception of Potter, it seems they have to be on the air now. (Q: Will Game of
Thrones show up when the show starts?)

~~~
wutbrodo
Better Angels is way too dense for me to imagine it ever getting up towards
the top of the bestseller lists. Gladwrlls stuff is a lot more tuned for mass
appeal.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Better Angels is way too dense for me to imagine it ever getting up towards
> the top of the bestseller lists.

If Oprah recommended a book, a lot of people would buy it even if they had no
intention of reading it, and similarly for other major cultural figures.

~~~
wutbrodo
Ah thanks for the info. I have no idea what books Oprah recommends but I'm
surprised this was one of them. I've read it, and I liked but not loved it,
but it certainly wasn't in line with what my vague understanding of Oprah's
book club was.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I'm not claiming that Oprah recommended any book. I'm saying that "Better
Angels is too dense to be a bestseller" doesn't work as a counterargument to
"a celebrity recommended it, so I thought Better Angels would have better
sales".

~~~
wutbrodo
I disagree. The reason I was surprised when I thought you were saying Oprah
recommended it is that Oprah doesn't really recommend books like this. That's
not unrelated to the fact that her audience would think "man, Oprah's book
recs suck" if she kept recommending books too dense for her audience.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Of the millions of people who bought Obama's biography, how many do you think
read it? It's dense. But for a lot of people, the point of buying a book is to
let other people know that you bought it.

------
patja
Amazon continues to underwhelm with their lack of delivery on the potential
presented by their vast store of purchase history. In some ways, this
justifies their high stock price as they have this valuable asset they have
yet to tap. Some day they will turn their gaze towards unlocking its
potential. In the meantime, it reeks of incompetence at worst or a puzzling
lack of focus at best when they keep urging me on my Kindle lock screen to buy
a self-published bodice-ripper or diapers when nothing in my purchasing
history could possibly suggest this as a good use of advertising effort.

~~~
feintruled
Indeed. I trialled the Amazon Prime Kindle library and trying to browse what
was on offer just brought me to page upon page of what I can only describe as
'shite'. Endless self-published thrillers and erotica with stock photo covers.
Why their recommendation algorithms failed so spectacularly in that case I can
only wonder (and before you ask, that is not my normal reading material!)

------
otto_ortega
The moral of the story is that if you want a book to become popular and go
mainstream you need to make a movie or tv show about it first...

It doesn't matter if the cinematic version is good or not, a lot of people
will read the book only to be able to complaint about how they screwed it with
the script and be that one friend that is the authority about X or Y show,
because you know... he read the book...

Up Next: Harry Poter And The Bayesian Statistics

~~~
jerf
"Harry Poter And The Bayesian Statistics"

Already been written: [http://www.hpmor.com/](http://www.hpmor.com/)

~~~
otto_ortega
The more you know... hahaha

------
dsjoerg
I found the prominence of the agent's name noteworthy. Compare to the NYT
Bestsellers list where the agent name is missing:
[https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-
sellers/?_r=0](https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/?_r=0)

Is Amazon doing this because Amazon envisions a future where publishers aren't
important but agents still are?

------
atotic
Amazon used to have "what people in your city are buying?" charts when it was
still a bookstore. I loved it, so much more useful than generic bestseller
list. I think privacy concerns killed it....

------
djsumdog
What people are reading ... makes me want to rip all my Kindle/Google/Nook
books using DRM removal tools and read them in a reader app that doesn't
report all my metrics back.

~~~
hart_russell
c'mon man. Myself and everyone else are dying to know what you're reading.

~~~
djsumdog
You know it's not even the individual thing. It's the fact that our miniscule
data is used to track how entries countries are moving and thinking at scale
(although in this case, only for Kindle customers). That should worry us.

------
jonknee
Having most read vs most sold is an interesting delta that only Amazon can
really do. It would be interesting if they publicized other stats like
"most/least completed"...

~~~
scholia
Average number of pages they read before giving in....

------
degenerate
Very strange UX, too much whitespace, too much info hidden behind non-obvious
clickable regions. Rating stars too small. Doesn't feel like Amazon.

~~~
r3bl
I don't get it. Why is there no price for any edition of the books listed?

Also, the two buttons (one shaped like a shopping cart, the second one shaped
like a book) made me think that the first one is to add the book directly to a
cart, and the second one to download a sample to my Kindle. But nope, the
first one brings you to an actual Amazon page about the book, and the second
one, even though it's located on read.amazon.com subdomain (the same one used
for Kindle's Cloud Reader) has a different interface underneath it, not tied
to your Kindle account. I've noticed that because Chromium is "not supported"
while read.amazon.com is supported just fine when viewing it in Chromium.

Hovering over these buttons gives me no indication of what those buttons were
and I had to apply the "click and see what happens" tactic.

------
pythonistic
It looks like a new front-end on Zeitgeist (which looks like it's completely
disappeared from the category pages).

~~~
pythonaut_16
I'm pretty disappointed in the performance just from poking around a little.

There's a noticeable delay switch from Most Read to Most Sold and from Fiction
to Nonfiction.

My Dev Tools are showing it takes ~500-700ms for that switch to occur.

~~~
pythonistic
Note that this page is separate from a landing page (like the front page or a
category) and a product page. Those have very strict requirements for how long
a page component can take to render. This one is allowed to break the rules.

I wonder what they've got backing these pages. DynamoDB? memcached in front of
S3? Redshift or AWS Lambda?

------
erickhill
The alternating binary star colors on the hover state almost create a strobe
effect. For a moment, I thought the rating reversed on hover and I had to
pause and analyse what was going on.

------
djrogers
Says something that my immediate reaction was that this would be a web service
to create charts. And my next thought was that they'd all probably default to
not having a Y-axis ;-)

------
nichochar
SO much harry potter.

~~~
HenryTheHorse
Ironically, that series is one of the cultural artifacts of the late-90s that
fueled the growth of e-commerce. I remember ordering a copy of the first Harry
Potter book from Amazon just for the novelty of shopping online.

~~~
mod
Late 90s? Is it really that old?

I'm old.

When HP came out I thought it was a series for children, and I never picked it
up. Some of my friends did, though.

Someday I'll get around to it.

------
miguelrochefort
I was expecting Kotlin books.

------
corpMaverick
Anyone has any recommendations on the top non-fictions books on this list?

------
danchristian
Maybe one of the first pieces of non-shit UI work I have seen from Amazon

------
johnchristopher
That's funny how the titles aren't actual links. Oh, well.

------
coryfklein
Really? The data is only grouped by week? Despite how much I'd love to read 52
books a year, the actual number is closer to 10.

Best books of the month/year is an order of magnitude more useful to me than
what people are reading this week.

~~~
dredmorbius
I also prefer seeing how my information ages:

[http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-
novels/](http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/)

[http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-
nonfiction/](http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/)

I'm more inclined to the Board's list than the (self-selecting, possibly
motivated) Readers'.

WEF have a list of the 20 most influenctial books:

[https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/the-20-most-
influenti...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/the-20-most-influential-
books-in-history/)

Wikipedia has an (IMO) fascinating list of the most-sold books of all time.
The Bible and Quotations from Chairman Mao (a/k/a "The Little Red Book") each
have claims of over 1 billion volumes (1-6 being the range) sold. The next
highest-selling book, _Don Quixote_ , at 500m copies.

Contrast that with the most-viewed YouTube video of all time -- Gangnam Style
has amassed 2.8 billion views in five years. That's still the YouTube record
so far as I'm aware.

That makes me wonder what the highest number of impressions of _any_ one media
work has been.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_books](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0)

------
ben_jones
Did anyone else think this would be a javascript library?

------
abhinavk
And how many of them are available in Kindle Unlimited?

~~~
dwg
I checked the most read non-fiction and only one is available on Kindle
Unlimited: #17, Think and Grow Rich.

------
GlobalServices
I like the idea of seeing books people actually read. There are some notable
cases of books that sell but are never read...

------
meesterdude
Lots of confusion if this is a JS charting library.

Mods, Please expand on title and add - The Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books
of the Week

------
dxbydt
So "most read" doesn't include people who actually read physical books! Just
people who listen to books via audible, and people who swipe pages via kindle
( ok that still counts as reading, but real reading in my books ahem...would
definitely count people reading a real book).

"most sold" is problematic as well - everytime you download a free sample, it
is counted as sold?!!! I probably download 10 free samples every month, end up
actually buying very few. Yet I have been "sold" all these books ?!! Come on.

That said, as a newly naturalized citizen who is still trying to find his
bearings in this country, the taste of the public fills me with despair - same
formulaic Baldacci James Patterson Stephen King on every list. Even the
nonfiction isn't much better. Maybe HN should do one of these charts - you can
at least get a few books actually worth reading.

~~~
dredmorbius
There's a reason that traditional dead-tree bookstore bestseller lists were
called "bestsellers" and not "bestreaders".

Some information is ... difficult to acquire.

Though spending patterns are at least a form of honest signalling of intent,
regardless of fulfillment or achievement.

