That's right. Rachel Deahl of Publisher's Weekly
has reported today that an Amazon representative told her that, within “a few weeks,” Amazon "will be splitting its Kindle bestseller list, creating one list for paid books and another for free titles."As of today, the top 10 titles on the Kindle bestseller list, and 33 of the top 50, are either currently free or achieved their lofty ranking due to being free until the past couple of days.
The prospect of a bifurcated list will certainly create a different look and feel for the Kindle Store sales rankings, and could conceivable reduce the incentive for publishers and authors to offer free promotional downloads of some of their Kindle-formatted books. But if Deahl's report is true the new top 10 will soon include names like Larsson, Patterson, Turow, Stocket, Quindlen, Coben, Bush, Baldacci, Junger, and Rachman.
We'll be back soon with some analysis of how this reported change will fit in with a number of major changes that are now in the process of occurring in the Kindle catalog.
2 comments:
This change can be good...or it can be total chaos. I did an experiment just now: I searched (on Amazon) for free Kindle downloads. The result was 12,000+ listings and in no particular order that I could discern. In the drop down menu, I clicked "by publication date." The result? A lengthy list of books WITH PRICE TAGS but still under the heading of free kindle books. Amazon needs to do some serious work on making it possible to sort these lists in various orders: alphabetical, by publication date, by "best" selling, etc. If they don't, this separation will be extremely difficult for Kindle users.
One other complaint: it is impossible to go forward (in a search result) no more than three pages at a time, when one knows the list must be at least 50 pages long. Many sites with lengthy lists or images have a drop down menu in which I can choose what page number is desired; i.e., list shows 50 pages, and if I wish, I can indicate page 45. I suppose this is just me thinking wishfully again. Thanks for the opportunity to vent, Steve.
"Bestseller" does seems to imply that money changed hands. I think splitting off the most popular free titles from the most popular purchases makes sense.
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