The simple answer is that it means different things to different people, but I’ll expand on that.

If you are an Amazon.com customer looking at the “Product Details” for a specific book, you might interpret Amazon.com’s sales rank as a measure of the popularity of that book. The lower the Amazon.com sales ranking number, the more popular the book will be as determined by the number of recent sales of that title through the Amazon.com marketplace. This is true in general, but if you really want to know the popularity of a specific title, you should also consider the publication date and how long it has been marketed on Amazon.com. For example, a book with an Amazon.com sales rank of 100,000 that has only been released and marketed on Amazon.com for a few days may become very popular in the near future and hit the top ten. That it is only ranked 100,000 at the moment is a bit misleading because the time period over which this rank was determined is not really long enough to measure true popularity.

For a bookseller, Amazon.com’s sales rank is often correlated with how quickly a particular title could sell. A book with a very low number on Amazon.com’s ranking can be expected to sell within minutes to hours after being listed, and a book with a 4,000,000 sales ranking can take several years. to be sold. Booksellers frequently use the analogy when looking for books to add to their inventory. If a bookseller finds a book that has an online value of $ 10, an Amazon.com sales rank of 2,105,878 and is faced with buying it for $ 4, they will likely pass, but if the sales rank were 45,017, it could suddenly be a book worth adding to your inventory.

When searching for books, I look at Amazon.com’s sales range for higher-priced books because I don’t want to pile a lot of firewood on my shelves, but it’s certainly not the measure I use for most book purchases. The scientist in me wanted to know more, so I compiled Amazon.com rating data for thousands of the books I’ve sold, using Amazon.com ratings both at the time I bought them and at the time they were published. I sold, respectively. As an engineer, I had to collect and torture data to see if there was any correlation between Amazon.com’s sales rank and the time it takes to sell a book. In fact, there is, at least in my experience, and doing a curve fit to the data returned a correlation coefficient of 0.93. The well-being of fit of the data is particularly evident on a semi-log plot.

You see, Amazon.com’s sales rank has a meaning.

For the book buyer, it is a measure of the popularity of a book.

For the bookseller, it is a measure of how quickly a book could sell and whether the book could simply be firewood or not.

For the engineer, it’s just a bunch of more data that can be tortured into a kind of confession.

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