Bestsellers by NYT, B&N, amazon.com 目前最畅销书

12/29/2012

Top Books of 2012 - Best Books of the Year


Top Books of 2012

Our Best Books of 2012 lists is still a work in progress since 2012 is not over yet. Use this list to find out the best books of 2012 so far and check out this 2012 New Releases Calendar for information on hot titles that are soon to be released.
'The Orphan Master's Son' by Adam Johnson
Random House
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson is a novel that takes place in North Korea and follows one man's life from an orphan through many twists and turns. Although The Orphan Master's Son is literary fiction, the rich prose and deep themes are coupled with interesting characters and a plot that keeps pages turning.
·         Complete review of The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
Cover Photo Courtesy Random House
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'In the Shadow of the Banyan' by Vaddey Ratner
Simon & Schuster
In the Shadow of the Banyan is a story of a young girl in Cambodia during the devastating period from 1975 to 1979. Largely based on Ratner's own story, this novel is beautiful and devastating at the same time.
·         Read a complete review of In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner



'Behind the Beatiful Forevers' by Katherine Boo

Random House
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo is narrative nonfiction that takes place in a Mumbai slum. Boo avoids cliches and expected narratives. She tells a gripping story that tugs at the heart and mind.
·         Complete review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

'The Age of Miracles' by Karen Thompson Walker
Random House
The Age of Miracles is Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel. It is told from the perspective of an eleven year old in a future where the earth's rotation has begun slowing. Walker writes a quiet suspense that will draw readers into the fantastical premise and remind them what it feels like to grow up.
·         Read a complete review of The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker


'The Fault in Our Stars' by John Green
Dutton Juvenile
The Fault in Our Stars is a young adult novel that has big crossover appeal. It is told from the perspective of a sixteen year old girl with terminal cancer. The characters think and feel big, and will make readers want to stick with them to the end.
·         Complete review of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

'Gold' by Chris Cleave
Simon & Schuster
Gold is a book about the 2012 Olympics, released in the same month as the Olympics. When I heard that, I expected it to be a flimsy story and a marketing ploy. Clearly I forgot that Chris Cleave is a brilliant writer.Gold is a story that will shine even when the Olympics is just a memory.
·         Complete review of Gold by Chris Cleave


'The Yellow Birds' by Kevin Powers

Little, Brown
Kevin Powers was a soldier in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. His debut novel,The Yellow Birds, is a lyrical and heartbreaking account of one soldier's experience in that war. This is a book that is beautiful and important, but also difficult.
·         Read a complete review of The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers


'Telegraph Avenue' by Michael Chabon
Harper
Telegraph Avenue is a gritty, gutsy novel -- not just in its content, but also in the ways Michael Chabon experiments with writing. This story of a small record store reverberates bigger than expected.
·         Read a complete review of Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon


10 Best Movies of 2012 (Andrew O’Hehir’s)

Read here: Andrew O’Hehir’s 10 Best Movies of 2012
No. 1 of the Andrew O'Hehir's 10 Best Movies of 2012

11/23/2012

The week in tech: 5 must-know things on USAToday.com:

The Week in Tech: 5 Must-Know Things
http://usat.ly/SeS5vQ
Wii U has 30 launch titles, including Hulu Plus.(Photo: Jae C. Hong AP)
3:39PM EST November 23. 2012 - It's the most wonderful time of the year! For tech companies, at least. Black Friday kicks off the holiday selling season with deals in stores for all sorts of tech gadgets, including the Wii U and Samsung's Galaxy Camera. Here are five things you need to know about this week in Tech:
The Wii video game console is expanding into mobile with the Wii U, available now in stores.
USA TODAY's Brett Molina played around with the new console and said its GamePad 6.2-inch tablet controller "presents several intriguing possibilities" for gameplay. It looks bulky at first, but "feels comfortable to handle for even the most complex video games."
The new Wii system is still pretty bare, with a limited selection of apps and games. The Wii U offers 30 launch titles, and users must wait until next month to download Nintendo TVii. Video app Hulu Plus just became available this week.
But the Wii U's current offerings are still pretty good — the system has a revamped online hub, Nintendo Network, an eShop for purchasing games, a Web browser and a social "Miiverse."
If you're looking to upgrade to a new TV, now is the time. USA TODAY's Mike Snider took a look at the best TV deals for the holiday season.
Here's what you need to know before you head out to Best Buy, Target or other electronics retailers:
Small TVs are getting cheaper. Small HDTVs are priced at a new low of $97 or less at Kmart, Sears and other retailers, but quantities will be limited at stores.
The bigger the better. 50-inch flat-panel TVs are a hot-ticket item this year, with an average retail price of $631. Some 60-inch displays regularly priced at $999 could come in below $900 in the coming weeks. And if you're willing to shell out the big bucks for a really big TV, Sharp is selling a 90-inch set for $10,999.99.
Get smart. Most TV sets on the market right now can stream video from Hulu, YouTube and other programs. If you want to save money and buy a TV set without video-streaming capabilities, you can always buy add-on devices such as a Blu-ray Disc player or an Apple TV box to connect your TV to the Internet.
Is it a smartphone? Is it a camera? Samsung's new Galaxy Camera from AT&T looks and operates much like one of the company's Galaxy smartphones. To be clear, though, this is not a phone.
The camera has a 4.8-inch high-definition screen and a touch-screen display on the rear. Users can connect to the Internet on Wi-Fi or a 4G network to share pictures on a social network or e-mail them to friends. AT&T also offers 5 GB of cloud storage, roughly 5,000 photos.
But be warned — connectivity doesn't come cheap. The Galaxy camera itself cost $499.99, plus $10 a month for the 4G network. Additional data for the camera costs $15 a month for 250 megabytes and up to $50 a month for 5 GB of storage space.
Twitter's most popular mayor is taking on a new medium: video.
Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker is a one-third partner in #waywire, kind of a "socially conscious YouTube" that lets users watch a small collection of videos and recommend videos to their friends. The startup has media partners such as Reuters and MTV, and the site counts Lady Gaga and women's health advocate Sarah Brown among contributors. It also has a daily news recap show, TweetTap.
USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham talked to the folks at #waywire and its supporters to find out what makes the site worth the hype. They said the site's small video library, a stark contrast to YouTube's supersized video collection, gives users a more personalized experience.
Sarah Pena, the founder of YouTube star management company Big Frame, sums it up best when she says finding videos on YouTube is "THE problem." Pena says about the site: "Discoverability is a huge challenge. I go to YouTube.com, then what? Hopefully, places like #waywire can help cut through all the noise with curation."
Scientists got a rare look at a dwarf planet near Pluto last year, but they are still trying to make sense of the planet's odd features.
Makemake, a planet that orbits at 4.85 billion miles from the sun, has an oblong shape and no atmosphere. Scientists believe any atmosphere on the planet likely froze out some time ago.
Makemake is one of three planets in the Kuiper belt. Scientists hope that this trio can help them better understand dwarf planets and the farthest edges of the solar system.

10/11/2012

China’s Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize

LONDON — Mo Yan, a wildly prolific and internationally renowned Chinese author who considers himself nonpolitical but whose embrace by the ruling Communist Party has drawn criticism from dissident writers, was on Thursday awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, the underworld, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum” (1987; published in English in 1993) which takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh lives of rural Chinese, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.

“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award.

Mr. Mo has not been shy of lacing his fiction with social criticism, but at the same time he has carefully navigated whatever invisible line the government considers unacceptable. He has also appeared at times to embrace the establishment, and serves as vice chairman of the party-run Chinese Writers’ Association. Yet when the émigré novelist and critic Gao Xingjian won the literature prize in 2000 and was criticized for having given up his Chinese citizenship, Mr. Mo publicly defended him.

He is the just the second Chinese resident citizen to win a Nobel; the first was the jailed dissident writer and political agitator Liu Xiaobo, who won the peace prize two years ago. But in contrast to the Chinese government’s anger over that award, which included refusing to allow Mr. Liu to accept it and exacting diplomatic penalties against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, Beijing reacted to this one as an international vindication.

The announcement was celebrated on the China Central Television evening news broadcast, which took the unusual step of breaking into its regular news coverage for a special report. The populist state-run Global Times newspaper immediately placed a “special coverage” page, clearly prepared in advance, on its English-language Web site.

When the organizers contacted Mr. Mo, said Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, “he said he was overjoyed and scared,” The Associated Press reported.

The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Shandong Province, in the east, where much of his fiction is set. He became a teenager during the tumult of Cultural Revolution, leaving school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. His first short story was published in 1981.

The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” is actually a pen name that reflects, he has said, the time in which he grew up, a time when criticizing those in power could be ruinous.

“At that time in China, lives were not normal so my father and mother told me not speak outside,” he said during a cultural forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. “If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak.”

Critics in the West have lavished praise on Mr. Mo. “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” a huge, ambitious work narrated by five successive animals who are themselves reincarnations of a man controlled by Yama, the lord of the underworld, “covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience,” almost like a documentary of the times, the Chinese scholar Jonathan Spence wrote in The New York Times in 2008.

“Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, ‘Life and Death’ remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary,” Mr. Spence wrote, calling the work “harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny.”

In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works, including “The Garlic Ballads” (1988, published in English in 1995) and “The Republic of Wine” (1992, published in English in 2000) “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”

Other works include “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (1996, published in English in 2004) — which was briefly banned before going on to become a huge best seller in China — and “Sandalwood Death” (2004, to be published in English in 2013). Mr. Mo’s most recent published work, called “Wa” in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy,” the academy said.

Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said that Mr. Mo was part of a generation of post-Cultural Revolution writers who began looking at Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, through new, nonparty-line eyes.

“For a very long time Chinese realism was of a socialist realist persuasion, so it had to be filled with ideological and political messages,” Mr. Hockx said in an interview. “But instead of writing about socialist superheroes,” Mr. Mo has filled his work with real characters with real frailties, Mr. Hockx continued, while at the same time portraying rural China as a “magical place where wonderful things happened, things that seemed to come out of mythology and fairy tales.”

But fellow writers, especially those outside the establishment, mistrust Mr. Mo’s failure to take a political stand. Last summer, he was criticized for joining a group of authors who transcribed by hand a 1942 speech by Mao Zedong. The speech, which ushered in decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, has been described as a death warrant for those who refused to subsume their talents in the Communist Party.

He was also criticized for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing barred a number of dissident writers.

Mr. Mo later gave a speech at the fair that provided a window into his complex thinking.

“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”

Sarah Lyall reported from London and Andrew Jacobs from Beijing. Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing.

8/28/2012

The Books Readers Are Talking About


Infinite Genius

The life and voice of a writer who inspired his generation.

When the multitalented writer David Foster Wallace took his own life in 2008, readers lost a voice that captured their era with humor, heart, and dazzling intelligence. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, D.T. Max gives us a revelatory look at an author whose personal struggles underlay his groundbreaking books.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
D. T. Max

See more details below.

8/21/2012

Barnes & Noble Narrows Its Losses as ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Lifts Sales

Barnes & Noble Narrows Its Losses as ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Lifts Sales
By JULIE BOSMAN



10:26 a.m. | Updated Add another happy beneficiary of the publishing powerhouse “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Barnes & Noble.

Sales of the erotic trilogy, which has dominated paperback and e-book best-seller lists for most of the year, along with the liquidation of the Borders chain in 2011, helped lift comparable bookstore sales in the fiscal first quarter at Barnes & Noble by 4.6 percent, the company said on Tuesday.

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, reported narrowing losses of $41 million, or 78 cents a share, in the three months that ended July 28, compared with $56.6 million, or 99 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Revenue grew 2.5 percent, to $1.45 billion.

Nook sales, at $192 million, remained flat from the year before. Sales of digital content, which include books, newspapers, magazines and apps, increased 46 percent. Total college bookstore sales increased slightly to $221 million.

The company has poured money into its Nook business in order to compete with Amazon, Apple and other rivals in the crowded e-book market. Last week, it dropped the prices for its color tablets.

“During the first quarter, we continued to see improvement in both our rapidly growing Nook business, which saw digital content sales increase 46 percent during the quarter, and at our bookstores, which continue to benefit from market consolidation and strong sales of the ‘Fifty Shades’ series,” William Lynch, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, said in a statement.

Analysts said they had hoped Barnes & Noble would be able to narrow its losses in the Nook business, particularly with increasingly heated competition in the tablet space this fall. Barnes & Noble is expected to introduce another new tablet in the coming months.

“On the positive side, the digital content is still growing pretty quickly, which means that either the overall end market is growing pretty quickly, which means that either the overall end market is growing or they’re taking share, which is encouraging,” Peter Wahlstrom, a senior analyst with Morningstar Equity Research, said in an interview.

To become profitable on the digital side, Barnes & Noble needs to increase its scale and distribution.

On Monday, Barnes & Noble made a long-awaited announcement that it would expand its Nook business into Britain beginning in October.

8/02/2012

Into the Nothing, After Something

‘Why Does the World Exist?’ by Jim Holt


Personal anecdotes on subjects as varied as mortality and dining sit amid the philosophical musings in Jim Holt’s new book.

8/01/2012

Sell Your Stuff as an Individual Seller


腾讯体育:澳大利亚主播质疑叶诗文:伦敦禁药检测仪不先进

国外媒体仍然质疑叶诗文成绩

中国游泳小将叶诗文在伦敦奥运会上的大放异彩,引发了世界体坛和舆论界的巨大震撼,最近几天,外媒对叶诗文成绩的质疑达到了疯狂的程度,从“机器人”到禁药风波,叶诗文如今是被关注的绝对焦点。为叶诗文加油!

澳大利亚广播电台主播萨莱斯和记者本奈特在前方赛场就此事提出了最新的看法,后者明确指出,目前西方人对叶诗文存在的质疑是相当广泛的。同时,基于近来有多位世界体坛名将职业生涯中能屡次顺利通过药检但却被举证服用了禁药,本奈特认为,目前的检测结果不足以证明叶诗文未服用禁药,很可能是受助于现有的检测仪器和技术手段不够先进。

萨莱斯首先表示:“16岁的中国游泳运动员叶诗文400米混合泳的夺金成绩比平时提高了足足5秒,为什么这届比赛中她会引发如此之多的争议呢?”本奈特也附和到:“她创造了个人的最好成绩,而且还刷新了去年在世锦赛上的成绩,更让人震惊的在于,她最后50米的成绩竟然比美国男泳名将罗切特在20岁时的最好成绩都要快。因此她在创造这一佳绩的同时也就引发了专家们的质疑:她的身体里究竟有多大的能量?如果不是这样的话,那在她的身体里恐怕有一些‘物质’存在。”

“依照惯例,每位金牌得主在赛后都会接受药检,比赛期间近半数的运动员也都会被要求接受检查,而且他们的检验样本会保存8年之久。但最近发生的事情让我们很吃惊,2004年雅典奥运会上一些运动员的样本在被重新检验时,一些在当时无法被检测出具体成分的违禁药物浮出水面,这其中就包括当时的一位摩洛哥中场跑运动员,最终他的金牌在8年后的这次药检结果不合格后被宣布剥夺。”

“因此这就是问题所在,现有的技术无法确保现阶段能够解决此类问题,无法阻止类似的事情再次发生,当然也就无法阻止就此产生的质疑。想想马里昂-琼斯吧,她因为说谎和作伪证最终被送进了监狱,但是她从未在任何一次药监中被查出有问题。同样的剧情在阿姆斯特朗身上也上演过,他从未在药监程序中失手,如果不是有人给出见证他使用禁药的证据,真相恐怕永远不会浮现。”

在2011年的世锦赛上,年仅15岁的叶诗文就凭借出色的发挥赢得金牌从而震惊了世界,但在当时她的成绩却并未引发如此巨大的争议。实际上一年多的时间来,叶诗文为了奥运加倍努力训练,加上她的身体素质和运动天赋确实过人,成绩有大幅提升并非偶然。奥运会比世锦赛的关注度远远高的多,西方人不敢相信中国游泳运动员能取得如此好成绩,提出质疑也可以理解,想当年刘翔( 微博 官网 博客 简介)赢得2004雅典奥运会金牌后,西方记者为了证明他服用了禁药甚至不惜花重金收买其启蒙教练。如今,在伦敦奥组委和中国游泳队都排除了叶诗文服用禁药的可能后,一切争议有必要到此彻底叫停了,对于中国运动员来说,最好的回击质疑的方式,就是有更多的运动员在过去我们不擅长的项目上杀出一片天地,彻底证明自己的强大。

3/07/2012

Read E-Books On Multiple Devices - Wired

source: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Read_E-Books_On_Multiple_Devices?oldid=78358

Read E-Books On Multiple Devices
Read E-Books On Multiple Devices From Wired How-To Wiki Revision as of 01:18, 8 March 2012 by amyzimmerman (Talk | contribs) (diff) ←Older revision | Current revision (diff) | Newer revision→ (diff) Jump to: navigation, search
Photo by Brad Moon, Wired.com

Why can't we all just get along?

When the ePub file format was created for e-books, it was meant to be an open standard, meaning that ePub e-books could be opened and read on any compatible device. Amazon went its own way with the Kindle and its proprietary AZW e-book format, but a wide range of competitors adopted ePub and did their part to make it a fair, ubiquitous format for all. Devices from Sony, Barnes & Noble and Kobo all support ePub, and when Apple released iBooks for iOS along with the iBookstore, it was announced that it would adopt ePub as its standard e-book format as well.

In theory, ePub is perfect; people shop around, buy some e-books from Barnes & Noble, maybe pick up a good deal on one through Kobo, and then read them all on their Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, or any supporting device they choose.

Unfortunately, who's ever heard of a standard that's perfect in practice? Cue the evil intro music and enter DRM, the stick in the mud that's wrecking this whole open ePub e-book love-fest.
 
This how-to was written by Brad Moon, who spends his days playing with gadgets, complaining about the music his kids listen to, dispensing tech industry advice to tech-wary investors, writing Wired.com How-Tos, blogging for GeekDad — and slipping in Canadianisms whenever he can.


The Basics of DRMDigital Rights
Management is what happens when various publishers and e-book merchants are worried that you're going to buy an e-book from them and proceed to splash it all over the Internet. Frankly, e-reader manufacturers wouldn't be that upset if you bought a whack of e-books from their e-bookstore, avoided the painstaking process of transferring their library to another device, and decided that the path of least resistance would be to keep buying their hardware instead of switching to a competitor. Oh, and that would mean that everyone who has access to your e-book library — your spouse, kids or whomever — would also need to use a compatible device.

To make matters even more complicated, e-books in the ePub standard don't necessarily use the same DRM standard, and only some methods cooperate. For example, Kobo e-books can generally be read on Sony devices since they both use an Adobe DRM scheme, but Apple uses its own proprietary DRM and doesn't recognize any of the others. The easiest way to deal with DRM shenanigans is to take the e-book file you've legitimately purchased and strip the DRM altogether, problem solved; no worries about e-book library portability or compatibility. Take DRM out of the equation and you're free to shop at any ePub e-bookstore for the best price, with no worries about hardware lock-in.

Apple and iBooks
Not that anyone else is innocent in this game, but Apple gets an extra load of shaming because of the way the company marketed iBooks and misleadingly promoted its adoption of the ePub open standard (presumably as a shot at Amazon). For example, this is a direct quote from Apple's website:

"And because the iBooks app uses ePub, the most popular open book format in the world, you can also use it to read ePub books you get from other sources with your computer. Just drag the ePub files into your iTunes Library (or select Add to Library from the iTunes File menu), then sync your iPad with your computer (iTunes 9.1 required). The books will appear on your shelf in iBooks right alongside the ones you get through iBookstore."

Sounds pretty sweet, except this only works with unprotected ePub titles and there aren't a whole lot of websites or publishers lining up to sell those. Additionally, with Apple moving gazillions of iPads — many of them to people who aren't necessarily inclined to read the fine print — there's been a real undercurrent of frustration with iBooks. What's particularly galling is that DRM-protected ePub e-books can be synced without any protest by iTunes or the iPad; the fail doesn't occur until an attempt is made to read the offending title.
Screenshot by Brad Moon, Wired.com

What About Apps?
Yes, for a multipurpose tablet like an iPad, you can download apps that let your read protected e-books purchased from other sources. Kobo has an app on the iTunes App Store, and so does Amazon for that matter. However, dedicated e-readers don't have this option, and keeping track of multiple apps and managing multiple libraries is a hassle. Apple supplies iBooks and it looks good, so why shouldn't you be able to access your entire library from there without having to go the app route?

Removing DRMBe aware that it is technically illegal to strip DRM from an e-book. It just so happens that with the right tools, it's remarkably easy. In any case, you bought the book, and if you feel that doing so entitles you to read it on the device of your choice, then here's what to do:

1.Download an ePub DRM removal tool. Make sure you find one that runs on your operating system. There are free versions out there, but one of the more popular paid products (available for Mac and Windows) is the aptly named ePub DRM Removal, which costs $29.95 and offers one-button ease of use.
2.Drop your purchased ePub file into the converter and let it do its thing.
3.Drag a copy of the resulting DRM-free version into iTunes (or import it/drag it to the ePub compatible e-reader of choice).
4.Synchronize the iPad or e-reader.
5.Enjoy reading your e-book!
Screenshot by Brad Moon, Wired.com



What About The Pretty iBook Covers?
Many iPad users have grown fond of the colorful book cover icon that appears on their iBooks bookshelf. When an unsupported ePub file is loaded into iBooks, the cover image is replaced with an ugly generic version which totally destroys the visual aesthetic of the bookshelf — a not-so-subtle visual reminder from Apple that you have polluted the iBooks environment with a file you bought elsewhere. No to worry, though; if an iOS device and iBooks combo is your e-reading method of choice, you can apply the same trick that's used for adding album art to non-iTunes music. Just select the eBook from iTunes, click the 'Get Info' option, and paste any image you want (presumably an image cover you've snagged off the web) into the 'Artwork' section and presto! Goodbye, generic cover.

3/03/2012

New York Times Best Sellers

How does the New York Times come up with the list of Best Sellers? Here is how: About the Best Sellers A version of this Best Sellers report appears in the March 11, 2012 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings on weekly lists reflect sales for the week ending February 25, 2012. Rankings reflect sales reported by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles. The sales venues for print books include independent book retailers; national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and discount department stores; and newsstands. E-book rankings reflect sales from leading online vendors of e-books in a variety of popular e-reader formats. E-book sales are tracked for fiction and general nonfiction titles. E-book sales for advice & how-to books, children's books and graphic books will be tracked at a future date. Titles are included regardless of whether they are published in both print and electronic formats or just one format. E-books available exclusively from a single vendor will be tracked at a future date. The universe of print book dealers is well established, and sales of print titles are statistically weighted to represent all outlets nationwide. The universe of e-book publishers and vendors is rapidly emerging, and until the industry is settled sales of e-books will not be weighted. Among the categories not actively tracked at this time are: perennial sellers, required classroom reading, textbooks, reference and test preparation guides, journals, workbooks, calorie counters, shopping guides, comics, crossword puzzles and self-published books. The appearance of a ranked title reflects the fact that sales data from reporting vendors has been provided to The Times and has satisfied commonly accepted industry standards of universal identification (such as ISBN13 and EISBN13 codes). Publishers and vendors of all ranked titles conformed in timely fashion to The New York Times Best Seller Lists requirement to allow for independent corroboration of sales for that week. Publisher credits for e-books are listed under the corporate publishing name instead of by publisher's division. Sales of both print books and e-books are reported confidentially to The New York Times. The Best Seller Lists are prepared by the News Surveys and Election Analysis Department of The New York Times. Royalty Share, a firm that provides accounting services to publishers, is assisting The Times in its corroboration of e-book sales. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above it. A dagger (†) indicates that some retailers report receiving bulk orders. Click here for an explanation of the difference between trade and mass-market paperbacks. Source: the New York Times

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