Best Non-sellers?

April 30, 2003 1:39 PM

Bookfinder has added an interesting new service: a report on the most requested out of print books, based on searches submitted to them between July and December 2002. Will publishers take note?
posted by PinkStainlessTail (8 comments total)

#1 most requested in the "Arts and Music" category: "Sex" by Madonna.

Art? ... Music?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 1:52 PM on April 30, 2003

I won't hold my breath for Bachman's (aka Stephen King) Rage to go back in print, since it was placed in limbo after the Columbine massacre. Fascinating list though.
posted by bobo123 at 2:00 PM on April 30, 2003

... otherwise, a great link. Thanks!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:03 PM on April 30, 2003

Some of these are edition specific too. Christie's Ten Little Niggers is in print, but under the gentler title of And Then There Were None.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 2:05 PM on April 30, 2003

"Anthony Adverse" tops the fiction list? Not only does the book blow, but it is as common as dirt, turning up by the dozens at every house sale and used book bin in the world. And in Sci-Fi, H.G. Wells "The Croquet Player?" Possibly the most worthless, unrewarding piece of garbage Wells ever wrote -- and also ubiquitous and easy to find. Great one, though, on the fiction and literature list: Van Wyck Brooks, "The World of Washington Irving". Brooks makes good books.
posted by Faze at 2:23 PM on April 30, 2003

The number 1 children's book, 'Northern Lights' by Philip Pullman, is called 'The Golden Compass' in the US.
posted by adrianhon at 2:40 PM on April 30, 2003

I'm a little puzzled. I have a hard time believing that there's really a critical mass of people searching for James Thomson's The Seasons (1730); I mean, it's a perfectly good early eighteenth-century poem, but most modern readers think Romanticism when they want nature poetry. How many people read William Cullen Bryant outside of American Literature II? There are certainly some things on the list that make sense (the Baring-Gould Sherlock Holmes, for example), but I guess I'm wondering about the actual statistics. What does "most sought after" mean in quantitative terms?
posted by thomas j wise at 2:58 PM on April 30, 2003

It doesn't seem all that useful. If the same person searches for the same book every hour of every day, will that boost it up in the charts? If a book scout is looking up a recently aquired book to see its worth, will that be filtered out? Will book searchers be willing to actually buy the book they are looking up?

You may have noticed the "Buyer Waiting" thing on some Amazon.com items. This lets sellers (or potential sellers) know that someone wants the item (at a certain price). Some people crawl the site, gather up the Buyer Waiting info, and then sell those reports, like these people. Those reports seem more useful than the bookfinder lists.
posted by gluechunk at 3:11 PM on April 30, 2003