Comments on: Top 20 Bestselling Scandinavian Books at Amazon US

By: Professor Batty

Professor Batty — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 05:33:35 +0000

The sagas are standard college fare, Undset is undergoing a resurgence with the new translations, Rolvaag’s book is the definitive story of the emigrant experience (original is in Norwegian) and an essential for Norwegian Americans. The other books seem about right- Scandinavian crime/psychology is hot!

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:00:07 +0000

Yes, Amazon US is certainly weird when it comes to classifying books. Stieg Larsson is subcategorized under Thrillers & Mysteries for TGWTDT, but under Contemporary for books 2 & 3. The new bestseller lists for the subcategories chart not only books that aren’t out yet, but Kindle editions, including promotional titles by writers nobody’s ever heard of and classics, all given away free. So how can something that costs nothing be a “bestseller”? When I check and chart my titles in Excel almost every day, I skip all the Kindle and any titles not “In Stock”. So sometimes one of Stieg’s books will be listed as 20 in Thrillers and 35 in Books — leaving out the other stuff might yield true figures for books on paper of #2 and #15. I complained, of course, probably along with other authors who are trying to keep reasonable track of their sales success, but to no avail. And oh yes, after going to a lot of trouble to write up an Author page for them and upload a picture, all of it was nuked a couple of weeks later when they decided that translators weren’t really authors. So how are they managing to sell so many copies to people who don’t read Swedish? Lots of stuff to fix at Amazon.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:46:47 +0000

Maxine and Barbara: Thanks for the comments. I think Amazon’s “algorithms” and offers are very likely to influence sales. As well, college reading lists are certainly a factor. Still, I am fairly confident “my” list also reveals some basic problems with Amazon’s classifications, which I wish they would fix.
However, I have to also say that it is better – in terms of finding info about groups or classes of books – to have some system, even if it is flawed, in place than no system at all. Amazon UK is, in this sense, much worse than Amazon in the US. At least for my purposes.

By: Barbara Fister

Barbara Fister — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:36:01 +0000

A very strange list! I could see some college readings perhaps finding their way to a “bestseller” list – but the only ones that I can imagine being on a core survey list would be the Prose Edda, the Ibsen, and Giants in the Earth (by a Norwegian-American).

This makes me feel a bit better about library cataloging and classification. Not perfect, but not this strange.

By: Maxine

Maxine — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:12:27 +0000

As you say, a very odd list, and clearly Amazon is not very good at classifying, both in terms of omission and inappropriate addition. From the bestseller charts issued by booksellers, etc, Stieg Larsson is doing very well in the US (and everywhere else). At the moment the UK Amazon site has a special offer on “Scandinavian crime fiction”, which would skew the results if you did this survey for the UK site I assume. The books in this special offer are indeed all Scandinavian but are by a very limited number of authors- Mankell (of course), Indridason, Edwardson, Fossum and one or two others. That is, in my case, all books I have already read.
Anyway, as you say, “your” list is dominated by best-sellers (with some strange omissions) and sagas. I assume this has a lot to do with how Amazon made the selections, rather than what people really are buying? Amazon also counts pre-orders in their bestseller charts which I don’t think is fair because clearly the books haven’t actually been read yet (or bought – some people will no doubt cancel their orders as pub date approaches). And we don’t know what algorithms Amazon uses, eg to point readers towards titles they happen to have a lot of in stock.