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April 25, 2024, 3:41 a.m. |

Simon Willison's Weblog simonwillison.net

No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies


I linked to a story the other day about book sales claiming "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies", based on numbers released in the Penguin antitrust lawsuit. It turns out those numbers were interpreted incorrectly.

In this piece from September 2022 Lincoln Michel addresses this and other common misconceptions about book statistics.


Understanding these numbers requires understanding a whole …

antitrust book books lawsuit numbers publishing sales statistics story them

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