Yes – The exact same books that are Amazon bestsellers are also Kindle store bestsellers. And they are bestsellers in the exact same order too.
How is this possible?
If you take out Kindle Specific books (ie. Kindle CookBook + USA Today) and books that are not available on the Kindle (like Beetle the Bard, Twilight and Southern Vampire compilations, etc.) then the first 20 books across both lists match exactly and in the exact same order.
- Breaking Dawn (#1 on Kindle) – #1 on Amazon Books.
- Eclipse
- New Moon
- UltraMind
- Twilight
- The Shack
- Suze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan.
- Outlier’s The Story of Success.
- Ann Coulter’s Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America. For the first 9 books the two lists are exactly the same. After this, certain bestsellers are not available for the Kindle, and there are some Kindle specific books. However books that are available on the Kindle are in the exact same order on the Kindle bestsellers list as they are in the main Amazon betsellers list.
- #11 Three Cups of Tea
- #12 Last Lecture
- #13 Best Life Diet CookBook
- #14 on Kindle The Host
- #15 Dreams From My Father
- #16 Story of Edgar Sawtelle
- #17 Flat Belly Diet
- #19 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (leaving out USA Today).
This leaves only three four possibilities -
- Cyrus’ option - fourth option. Perhaps the similarities between the two lists reflect the early adopter nature of kindle readers as avid consumers of mainstream titles. These folks would likely be interested in the books currently on the bestsellers lists. I suspect that folks interested in titles that are off-the-beaten path are less likely to be kindle owners.
- Amazon has no data on Kindle bestsellers and is forced to create a list based off AmazonBooks bestsellers. This is unlikely.
- The number of Kindles and Kindle owners is big enough to make it statistically very similar to the general Amazon population, with the exact same overall choice in books. This is, rather obviously, almost impossible.
- Amazon is creating a bestseller list based off of what they think will sell. As opposed to what actually sells. I take this back because radio babylon wrote something that makes sense.
Courtesy Radio Babylon – the reality is probably that Amazon has one list of books bestsellers and then shows items from this list that are available in each format. I don’t like it at all – however, it does explain why there would be identical titles and identical ordering in the Amazon Books and Kindle Books bestseller lists.
I’d originally started just to see if there were any interesting trends in the Kindle Bestsellers list. Here are some other interesting finds -
- 4 out of the top 5 bestsellers are Twilight Series books.
- David Emberson’s Kindle Cookbook is #10. Its the first self published book.
- Brent Week’s $1 The Way of Shadows is #14.
- USA Today is at #19 – the most popular newspaper by far.
- There are a bunch of free books in the bestsellers list – Charlie Huston’s Six Bad Things at #25, Caught Stealing at #32, and A Dangerous Man at #42. Laurie Notaro’s The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death at #27. The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss at #47. Murder List by Julie Garwood at #54. Prague by Arthur Phillips at #96. The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst at #80.
- The Best Life Diet at $3.39 is one of the lowest priced books, has a foreword by Oprah and has really good reviews.
Best Life Diet Kindle Edition for $3.39
- WSJ and NY Times are at #48 and #49.
- There are 12 books over the $9.99 price point out of the top 100 bestsellers.
- The Clutter Diet is at #77.
Interesting – however the uncanny resemblance between the bestseller lists is what really got my attention.
Filed under: books Tagged: | kindle mystery, kindle vs amazon books
Might i also suggest a fourth option. Perhaps the similarities between the two lists reflect the early adopter nature of kindle readers as avid consumers of mainstream titles. These folks would likely be interested in the books currently on the bestsellers lists. I suspect that folks interested in titles that are off-the-beaten path are less likely to be kindle owners.
my guess would be that the best seller list is generated by aggregate sales across all formats. the list is then culled to show only the titles available for the given format you are viewing. nothing nefarious, those titles ARE in fact amazon’s best sellers, and youre seeing WHICH of those best sellers are available for YOUR chosen format (print, ebook, audiobook, whatever) when you view the list.
First, it’s possible that Kindle users have similar buying preferences to all Amazon book buyers. Why do you assume that would be impossible?
But the best explanation is likely what the commenter above said.
I noticed this.
Come on, they don’t know what is the best Kindle sellers.
They just base it off of the overall sales.
im a programmer, and if i were writing a bit of bestseller list code, thats the way id do it
and the results would be whats been described here… and in my opinion, this is the CORRECT way to do it. bestsellers revolve around TITLES, not FORMATS. it doesnt make any sense to count the sales of “twilight” in paper seperately from the sales of “twilight” on the kindle. the TITLE “twilight” sold an f-ton. the formats and proportions across which that f-ton sold are irrelevant to its status as a bestseller.
I’ve wondered about this also. On some lists, my book has been as high as #4.
I have no idea how Amazon makes up the list. I can say that there is a correlation between my book’s sales and its position on the list. Other than that I don’t know. Amazon is not very open about this sort of thing. The “month-to-date” report that publishers get from the DTP system also gives incorrect data, because it reports duplicate transactions which Amazon strips out at the end of the month when they compute the royalty payment. There is no way for me to audit their numbers, so basically I have to trust them.
Regards,
David Emberson
What’s the Kindle Worth to Amazon?
NY Times Jan 8
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/business/09views.html?ref=business
I don’t think it’s impossible at all.
Most of the Kindle readers are just buying the same books they would have bought in paper format.
That’s what I do pretty much.
I’ve had a Kindle for 3 months and the problem for me has been finding outstanding books to read on the Kindle to get me used to reading this way.
I found two books that aren’t at the top of the lists, the autobiography of Osama Bin Laden’s mistress, Kola Boof (what a book!) and Roberto Bolano’s “2666″ about the unsolved mystery of the mass murdering of Mexican girls in this town and both blew me away. So when you have really strong material to read, the Kindle is a great device that makes you forget you’re reading a machine.
I don’t care about the “Bestsellers List”, but I did buy
a lot of the books that you posted are on it.
I actually snuggled up in bed with the Kindle when I was reading “2666″ and “Diary of a Lost Girl” because they were so good, and I notice that since I had the Kindle I’ve been purchasing a lot more books because there’s a huge discount on the Kindle Store books and also you start to feel funny if you don’t read something on this device for a long time. It compels you to use it.
I don’t think it’s strange that most people are buying the same bestsellers in Kindle edition.