Web curator Jason Kottke shares the items his readers bought after clicking on Amazon links he posted.
Weird that Amazon makes this information available. But good, I suppose, that it’s anonymous.
Double weird: people are still buying VHS. And Amazon is still selling it.
At this point, if you haven’t heard about what happened with Amazon’s sales rankings of certain books over the last couple of days, you’re probably not online. Tens of thousands of books lost their sales rankings, which meant they didn’t show up on bestseller lists, but also that they didn’t appear in searches. A disproportionate number of these books were on gay and lesbian themes, leading many to criticize Amazon for censorship.
Amazon’s official explanation is that it was a “glitch,” while a hacker is going around claiming responsibility with a very strange Craigslist-related story. No matter what exactly happened, everyone agrees Amazon handled it very badly. Most of all, they are all atwitter that the protest gained momentum on Twitter. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)
But what’s most fascinating to me isn’t the role of Twitter in all this. It’s our assumption that it is our RIGHT to know the complete truth about which books are being sold.
For years, we relied on bestseller lists published by institutions like the New York Times, but it’s an open secret that these lists don’t count the books that have literally sold the most copies in the U.S. There are complicated formulas and differing definitions of genres and categories. Lots of bookstores and retailers never get included in the surveys by the New York Times or Nielsen’s BookScan, including whole sectors like Christian booksellers.
But we now live in the Amazon world. Even though Amazon never promised to give us complete data, the exactness of a sales ranking, the way it is never rounded up or down, and the way the ranking can change moment to moment and not just week to week, all give us good reason to believe that no books are being excluded. When I search for “The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk” (which temporarily lost its sales ranking), I very much expect its sales ranking, 7,365 among “Books,” to be completely accurate at that moment. (The ranking’s already changed five minutes later.)
I kind of love that the public has demanded complete data from Amazon. Yes, the Internet furor was also about being vigilant against homophobia, but it also revealed that it will become increasingly harder to hide that books on homosexuality and other supposedly taboo topics are popular and being bought everyday. We’ve come to expect and rely on data like sales rankings, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” and “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?” For Amazon to suggest in any way that this data might be edited/censored/inaccurate felt like a horrific breach of trust.
The New York Times can manage its bestseller list any way it wants. Amazon can’t.
Sorry, it’s another semi-political post!
We at the Common Data Project are definitely interested in more than politics, but this Amazon map of political book-buying state by state was too interesting not to blog about it. It illustrates so many things I believe in.
One: Information-sharing can be fun.
People love patterns, and even more, knowing where they fit into them. The Amazon customers who are most likely to be drawn to this map are those who have bought political books, books that fall into the red, blue, or purple categories. No one is likely to be outraged that his purchase of Thomas Friedman’s book in the last 60 days got counted in designing this map. Although there’s a lot of data collection that Amazon prefers to keep on the down-low, this kind of tracking is refreshingly open and explicit. We know it’s being collected, and most of all, we get something in return. We all get to enjoy the data as well.
Two: Data has limited value if there is limited context.
As pretty as this map is, it doesn’t really provide much information. Junk Charts lays out a lot of the deficiencies that limit our ability to draw any meaningful conclusions. Providing the map with just the states colored in, but without real sales numbers, doesn’t give you a real sense of which books are selling better, in the same way that the 2004 election red-blue maps with their wide swaths of red in the middle didn’t provide real information about population density and how close the election had actually been, nor how seemingly blue or red states actually contained significant pockets of people who had voted for the other guy. How many people in South Dakota bought a “red” book? Ten, twenty, or a hundred thousand?
The paucity of information on how books were rated red, blue or purple drove me crazy, too. Every place I clicked to “Learn more,” it took me to the same very short four paragraphs. It says that the categorization was based on the book’s own promotional materials and the tags readers added to them, but I still wonder who categorized these books and precisely how they did so. Would all the authors necessarily have labeled their books as blue or red?
And if they were categorizing books as purple, as neither obviously liberal or conservative, why didn’t they include them in the percentage calculations by state?
Three: Underlying data should always be available for alternative analyses.
A lot of people are wary of data; they’ve heard too many times how numbers can be twisted to serve any purpose. We at the Common Data Project make no promises that data = truth, only that when data is truly open and available, conclusions based on that data can then be prodded, tested, and possibly refuted.
In this case, I’m not quite sure if Amazon does have a conclusion to assert, but the decisions it made about which data to include and exclude have shaped the map presented. One conclusion you might draw from a cursory glance might be the same one drawn by one of the commenters to the Junk Charts post—that people only read books they’re likely to already agree with. Imagine now if we could test that conclusion, if we could count how many readers in each state bought both “red” and “blue” books, or if there were readers who would consider themselves “conservative” but bought “liberal” books. Maybe there’s a very active and large political book club in Wyoming buying books from across the spectrum!
It may very well be true that people who identify as conservative buy “red” books, while people who identify as liberal buy “blue” books, but the map as provided doesn’t provide enough information to truly test that conclusion or propose interesting hypotheses of why that’s happening.
Still, I had a good enough time playing around with the map that I was reminded me of a book I’ve been meaning to read, which is probably Amazon’s ultimate goal anyway!
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