On Sep 22, 2006, at 8:37 AM, sean.andrews wrote:
> Point taken, but, anecdotally, because Amazon may not get the stock
> to fill them, as has
> happened to me on several occasions. I buy, they sell, tell me it
> will be here in 3 weeks; 2 months go by, they delay it a few
> times. Then they cancel. So, on the day that I buy "Debating
> Empire," the sales rating shoots up (because no one else was buying
> it), even though it was never sent to me (and, strangely, I still
> feel whole). In other words, it isn't really a sales figure but a
> measure of effective demand (or something like that).
They heavily weight recent sales in their rankings - they're not cumulative counts. When I was on the Moyers show when After the New Economy came out, it shot up to 45 by the next day. It quickly fell back to more familiar 5-digit regions.
Doug