13 ms·

The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong

160 points by gruseom 7y ago

pwinnski 7y ago
The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed? If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  This is the same publication staring down a $250m libel lawsuit for their inability to fact check before publishing. You expect too much from them.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tushon 7y ago
    That was dismissed recently, with a handy summary from the judge: The judge who oversaw the case, William O. Bertlesman, said in his dismissal, "The Court accepts Sandmann's statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not to impede or block anyone. However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being 'blocked' and not allowed to 'retreat.' He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but as discussed above, they are opinion protected by the First Amendment. And The Post is not liable for publishing these opinions." https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/media/washington-post-defamation-lawsuit-sandmann/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/media/washington-post-defamat...
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      It'll certainly be interesting to see where the appeal goes. I need to read the opinion, but my initial inclination is that the judge should have let it go to trial.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        Wins against newspapers for libel are extremely rare in First Amendment country.
        huffmsa 7y ago
        But we've also never been at a point in history where a "respectable" publication can blast erroneous information out at the scale the Post did. They might not lose the in a trial, but there needs to be reconning of some sort which breaks the assumed trust we've developed with antiquated publications.
        liability 7y ago
        You should consider the probability that in the past when newspapers deceived the public, the deception went largely unnoticed (at least at the time.) For instance, there is the time American newspapers almost single-handedly started a war with Spain. Or, even worse, the infamous case of Pulitzer Prize winner and genocide denying communist sympathizer Walter Duranty using the New York Times to promote Soviet propaganda during the Holodomor. The damage there is still ongoing, despite the NYTs coming clean half a century later. When HBO's Chernobyl mentioned it by name, that was the first time many Americans ever heard the word.
        lonelappde 7y ago
        FYI there is a memorial outside Union Station for visitors to Washington DC. https://parkplanning.nps.gov/projectHome.cfm?projectID=39537 https://parkplanning.nps.gov/projectHome.cfm?projectID=39537
        pwinnski 7y ago
        This is very, very incorrect. The term "yellow journalism" exists today because of really nasty work done in the late 1800s. Nobody at the Washington Post--or any other American newspaper today--is operating at nearly the same level of toxicity as William Randolph Hearst did then.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      The dismissal has issues and contradictions that several major lawyers and even other judges have pointed out, for example it was dismissed before any evidence was even adduced. Many of the claims the dismissal relies are on exactly the claims which would've been tested in court. I highly recommend this video as a good overview of the issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSRVnvfD6Cc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSRVnvfD6Cc
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    I'm not sure why the reply to you (from someone else) has vanished; perhaps that poster deleted it to redraft it. But your description of the case is, well, a little facile. This is the case of the Trump-supporting high school student who felt he was being unfairly portrayed in a confrontation with an American Indian activist in January, and indeed, it was dismissed last week. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9844670-181/judge-dismisses-libel-suit-against?sba=AAS https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9844670-181/judge-dismiss... The original reply to you said it was dismissed because the statements accused of being defamatory were mostly opinions, which is true, but in context, they weren't even the Post's opinions: they were statements by others, including the activist, the Post was reporting as having been said. The statements by the activist that he felt threatened are protected because, as opinion, they're not subject to libel laws; the Post's reporting on the activist's statements appear to be accurate.
  - matchbok 7y ago
    Frivolous lawsuit, you mean. Perhaps you need to do some fact-checking.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      My comments are merely opinion, fact checking not needed.
      - zenexer 7y ago
        As was the claim that was made in Washington Post, according to the judge. Edit: I initially said the claim was made by Washington Post, but it wasn’t their claim.
  - cptnapalm 7y ago
    As other replies stated, the suit was dismissed and for the reasons stated. However, this is how journalists do hit pieces: find someone who will say what they want to say then quote them and thus is slander converted into "news". In this case they wanted to hold up for public hatred a kid who was just waiting for his bus. Why else would a kid waiting for a school bus be news?
- OedipusRex 7y ago
  Someone probably did, and the person they told didn't take it any farther. The chain broke somewhere.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I misread it the first time as one month (May->June) but it was May 2018 to June 2019(!).
ilamont 7y ago
These lists can be manipulated. There was a case a few years back involving bogus bookstore sales of Lani Sarem’s "Handbook for Mortals" to trick the New York Times: Stamper and other YA writers, including Jeremy West, began to investigate. Stamper shared messages he had received from bookshop staff who said they had been contacted to see if their store was an NYT-reporting shop – the paper’s lists are collated from information supplied by a confidential group of stores – before a bulk order was placed. Another bookshop shared similar information with West, while Publishers Weekly reported that a shop outside Las Vegas had a customer who ordered 87 copies after learning it was an NYT-reporting shop. (Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-mortals-by-lani-sarem-pulled-from-nyt-bestsellers-list https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-m...) I'm also skeptical of data from Amazon, whose KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited ebook platform is notorious for scams designed to ensure rank or extra payouts for authors. See http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know/ http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-nee... for an explanation of how one scam worked, and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212.
- rosser 7y ago
  A friend used to work for an organization whose function was to buy books from NYT-reporting sellers for purposes of inflating the sales numbers of a given title, to manipulate it onto the bestseller list. They were usually paid by the publishers, but sometimes directly by the authors themselves. This has been going on for a very long time. EDIT: Phrasing.
  - rsj_hn 7y ago
    WOW, can I ask what the most common genre was?
    - rosser 7y ago
      I didn't ask, but in the conversations we had on the topic, I never got the sense that was a thing that mattered to them.
twerkinggumby 7y ago
They should just get rid of bestseller lists. They exist purely for marketing and for tricking chumps into buying mediocre books.
- adeelk93 7y ago
  Discovery is challenging, how would you propose finding something new to read?
  - Emma_Goldman 7y ago
    Read quality book reviews. I would especially recommend the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, but there are dozens of long-form journals of this kind. Most newspapers also have book review sections, as do many academic journals. Presumably if you're interested in someone or something, you can also simply peruse the internet to see what's out there, i.e. you can start with your interests rather than with what's popular or well-advertised.
  - dlivingston 7y ago
    A lot of influential figures publish their reading lists, like Bill Gates [0], Elon Musk [1], and Patrick Collision [2] [0]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-2019 https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-201... [1]: https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-he-mentioned-on-twitter-with-tweets-aee4361f3513 https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-h... [2]: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf
    - j88439h84 7y ago
      Why ask three people when you can ask a million?
      - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
        Because the opinion of the three might be worth more.
hirundo 7y ago
Kudos to the Post for attempting to produce an objective list. The New York Times doesn't: > In other words, The New York Times best-seller list is not a best-seller list -- which even The New York Times once acknowledged. In the early 1980s, William Peter Blatty, author of the monumental best-seller "The Exorcist," sued The New York Times for only listing his novel on the list one time, even though it sold in the millions. In defending itself before the court, as reported by Book History, the annual journal of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (Penn State University Press), The Times said, "The list did not purport to be an objective compilation of information but instead was an editorial product." https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-new-york-times-bestseller-list-another-reason-americans-dont-trust-the-media-n2471554 https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-...
- trentnix 7y ago
  Does that apply to the rest of paper as well?
  - phnofive 7y ago
    Taking your question at face value, yes, and it’s true of every private news company. They are first and foremost entertainers, and even those who hold themselves out as agents of change require a large audience.
  - jammygit 7y ago
    Not sure why the downvotes. If a news provider can’t promise to try to tell the truth in a legally binding way, but just claims to be editorializing, it’s no wonder there is so much public distrust of the news.
    - buboard 7y ago
      > to tell the truth in a legally binding way feels like these two are mutually exclusive
    - chillwaves 7y ago
peterlk 7y ago
Here's how "Best Sellers" become a thing: Publishers count the number of books they sell. This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed. Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller. If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just _be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them. The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have a best-seller. And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists market themselves as measuring. Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors. After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best-seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed, especially if it's run by algorithms. So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.
- greedo 7y ago
  Book sellers are rarely stuck with unsold inventory. They almost always have the ability to send unsold inventory (though not magazines) back to the publisher for full credit.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    So then if you have sufficient capital, you park it into your own book for a few weeks and then return it all later once the best-selling status is achieved? I can't imagine publishers would let this happen more than once or twice before revoking this ability for the seller. Inventory handling is expensive.
    - 7y ago
ycombonator 7y ago
In other words, Fake lists from fake news.
camillomiller 7y ago
That’s securities fraud
- rocqua 7y ago
  For which security?
  - camillomiller 7y ago
    I guess the joke wasn’t clear enough: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/a...
    - rocqua 7y ago
      I actually wondered whether it was a reference to Matt Levine. Does literally every HN reader also read his news-letter?

160 points by gruseom 7y ago

The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed? If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.

huffmsa 7y ago
This is the same publication staring down a $250m libel lawsuit for their inability to fact check before publishing. You expect too much from them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Tushon 7y ago
  That was dismissed recently, with a handy summary from the judge: The judge who oversaw the case, William O. Bertlesman, said in his dismissal, "The Court accepts Sandmann's statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not to impede or block anyone. However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being 'blocked' and not allowed to 'retreat.' He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but as discussed above, they are opinion protected by the First Amendment. And The Post is not liable for publishing these opinions." https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/media/washington-post-defamation-lawsuit-sandmann/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/media/washington-post-defamat...
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    It'll certainly be interesting to see where the appeal goes. I need to read the opinion, but my initial inclination is that the judge should have let it go to trial.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Wins against newspapers for libel are extremely rare in First Amendment country.
      - huffmsa 7y ago
        But we've also never been at a point in history where a "respectable" publication can blast erroneous information out at the scale the Post did. They might not lose the in a trial, but there needs to be reconning of some sort which breaks the assumed trust we've developed with antiquated publications.
        liability 7y ago
        You should consider the probability that in the past when newspapers deceived the public, the deception went largely unnoticed (at least at the time.) For instance, there is the time American newspapers almost single-handedly started a war with Spain. Or, even worse, the infamous case of Pulitzer Prize winner and genocide denying communist sympathizer Walter Duranty using the New York Times to promote Soviet propaganda during the Holodomor. The damage there is still ongoing, despite the NYTs coming clean half a century later. When HBO's Chernobyl mentioned it by name, that was the first time many Americans ever heard the word.
        lonelappde 7y ago
        FYI there is a memorial outside Union Station for visitors to Washington DC. https://parkplanning.nps.gov/projectHome.cfm?projectID=39537 https://parkplanning.nps.gov/projectHome.cfm?projectID=39537
        pwinnski 7y ago
        This is very, very incorrect. The term "yellow journalism" exists today because of really nasty work done in the late 1800s. Nobody at the Washington Post--or any other American newspaper today--is operating at nearly the same level of toxicity as William Randolph Hearst did then.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    The dismissal has issues and contradictions that several major lawyers and even other judges have pointed out, for example it was dismissed before any evidence was even adduced. Many of the claims the dismissal relies are on exactly the claims which would've been tested in court. I highly recommend this video as a good overview of the issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSRVnvfD6Cc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSRVnvfD6Cc
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I'm not sure why the reply to you (from someone else) has vanished; perhaps that poster deleted it to redraft it. But your description of the case is, well, a little facile. This is the case of the Trump-supporting high school student who felt he was being unfairly portrayed in a confrontation with an American Indian activist in January, and indeed, it was dismissed last week. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9844670-181/judge-dismisses-libel-suit-against?sba=AAS https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9844670-181/judge-dismiss... The original reply to you said it was dismissed because the statements accused of being defamatory were mostly opinions, which is true, but in context, they weren't even the Post's opinions: they were statements by others, including the activist, the Post was reporting as having been said. The statements by the activist that he felt threatened are protected because, as opinion, they're not subject to libel laws; the Post's reporting on the activist's statements appear to be accurate.
- matchbok 7y ago
  Frivolous lawsuit, you mean. Perhaps you need to do some fact-checking.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    My comments are merely opinion, fact checking not needed.
    - zenexer 7y ago
      As was the claim that was made in Washington Post, according to the judge. Edit: I initially said the claim was made by Washington Post, but it wasn’t their claim.
- cptnapalm 7y ago
  As other replies stated, the suit was dismissed and for the reasons stated. However, this is how journalists do hit pieces: find someone who will say what they want to say then quote them and thus is slander converted into "news". In this case they wanted to hold up for public hatred a kid who was just waiting for his bus. Why else would a kid waiting for a school bus be news?
OedipusRex 7y ago
Someone probably did, and the person they told didn't take it any farther. The chain broke somewhere.
Someone1234 7y ago
I misread it the first time as one month (May->June) but it was May 2018 to June 2019(!).

ilamont 7y ago

These lists can be manipulated. There was a case a few years back involving bogus bookstore sales of Lani Sarem’s "Handbook for Mortals" to trick the New York Times: Stamper and other YA writers, including Jeremy West, began to investigate. Stamper shared messages he had received from bookshop staff who said they had been contacted to see if their store was an NYT-reporting shop – the paper’s lists are collated from information supplied by a confidential group of stores – before a bulk order was placed. Another bookshop shared similar information with West, while Publishers Weekly reported that a shop outside Las Vegas had a customer who ordered 87 copies after learning it was an NYT-reporting shop. (Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-mortals-by-lani-sarem-pulled-from-nyt-bestsellers-list https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-m...) I'm also skeptical of data from Amazon, whose KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited ebook platform is notorious for scams designed to ensure rank or extra payouts for authors. See http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know/ http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-nee... for an explanation of how one scam worked, and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212.

rosser 7y ago
A friend used to work for an organization whose function was to buy books from NYT-reporting sellers for purposes of inflating the sales numbers of a given title, to manipulate it onto the bestseller list. They were usually paid by the publishers, but sometimes directly by the authors themselves. This has been going on for a very long time. EDIT: Phrasing.
- rsj_hn 7y ago
  WOW, can I ask what the most common genre was?
  - rosser 7y ago
    I didn't ask, but in the conversations we had on the topic, I never got the sense that was a thing that mattered to them.

twerkinggumby 7y ago

They should just get rid of bestseller lists. They exist purely for marketing and for tricking chumps into buying mediocre books.

adeelk93 7y ago
Discovery is challenging, how would you propose finding something new to read?
- Emma_Goldman 7y ago
  Read quality book reviews. I would especially recommend the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, but there are dozens of long-form journals of this kind. Most newspapers also have book review sections, as do many academic journals. Presumably if you're interested in someone or something, you can also simply peruse the internet to see what's out there, i.e. you can start with your interests rather than with what's popular or well-advertised.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  A lot of influential figures publish their reading lists, like Bill Gates [0], Elon Musk [1], and Patrick Collision [2] [0]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-2019 https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-201... [1]: https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-he-mentioned-on-twitter-with-tweets-aee4361f3513 https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-h... [2]: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf
  - j88439h84 7y ago
    Why ask three people when you can ask a million?
    - read_if_gay_ 7y ago
      Because the opinion of the three might be worth more.

hirundo 7y ago

Kudos to the Post for attempting to produce an objective list. The New York Times doesn't: > In other words, The New York Times best-seller list is not a best-seller list -- which even The New York Times once acknowledged. In the early 1980s, William Peter Blatty, author of the monumental best-seller "The Exorcist," sued The New York Times for only listing his novel on the list one time, even though it sold in the millions. In defending itself before the court, as reported by Book History, the annual journal of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (Penn State University Press), The Times said, "The list did not purport to be an objective compilation of information but instead was an editorial product." https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-new-york-times-bestseller-list-another-reason-americans-dont-trust-the-media-n2471554 https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-...

trentnix 7y ago
Does that apply to the rest of paper as well?
- phnofive 7y ago
  Taking your question at face value, yes, and it’s true of every private news company. They are first and foremost entertainers, and even those who hold themselves out as agents of change require a large audience.
- jammygit 7y ago
  Not sure why the downvotes. If a news provider can’t promise to try to tell the truth in a legally binding way, but just claims to be editorializing, it’s no wonder there is so much public distrust of the news.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > to tell the truth in a legally binding way feels like these two are mutually exclusive
  - chillwaves 7y ago

peterlk 7y ago

Here's how "Best Sellers" become a thing: Publishers count the number of books they sell. This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed. Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller. If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just _be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them. The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have a best-seller. And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists market themselves as measuring. Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors. After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best-seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed, especially if it's run by algorithms. So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.

greedo 7y ago
Book sellers are rarely stuck with unsold inventory. They almost always have the ability to send unsold inventory (though not magazines) back to the publisher for full credit.
- bduerst 7y ago
  So then if you have sufficient capital, you park it into your own book for a few weeks and then return it all later once the best-selling status is achieved? I can't imagine publishers would let this happen more than once or twice before revoking this ability for the seller. Inventory handling is expensive.
  - 7y ago

ycombonator 7y ago

In other words, Fake lists from fake news.

camillomiller 7y ago

That’s securities fraud

rocqua 7y ago
For which security?
- camillomiller 7y ago
  I guess the joke wasn’t clear enough: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/a...
  - rocqua 7y ago
    I actually wondered whether it was a reference to Matt Levine. Does literally every HN reader also read his news-letter?