Nielsen BookScan

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Nielsen BookScan is a data provider for the book publishing industry, owned by the Nielsen Company. BookScan compiles point of sale data for book sales.^[1][2][3][4]

Contents 1 History 2 Methodology 3 Use of BookScan 4 References 5 Further reading

[edit] History

Following the success of Nielsen SoundScan which tracked point of sale figures for music, the Nielsen Company decided to launch a similar service for book sales. Nielsen BookScan was launched in January of 2001.^[1] Previously, tracking of book sales, such as by the New York Times Best Seller list, was done without raw numbers. The New York Times would survey hundreds of outlets to estimate which books were selling the most copies, and would publish rankings but not figures. Only the publisher of a book tracked how many copies had been sold, but rarely shared this data.

[edit] Methodology

Nielsen BookScan relies on point of sale data from a number of major book sellers. The BookScan system records all sales from Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, Follett, Costco and many independent book stores. BookScan, however, does not have access to sales at Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, CVS, Duane Reade and other outlets such as grocery stores that, in aggregate, sell a large number of books.^[2][1]

Nielsen estimates that BookScan figures represent about 70 percent of sales for a typical hardcover book. But comparison with data from publishers suggests that BookScan may under-report certain types of books. A comparison from Publishers Weekly found that Nielsen captured 70 percent of sales for Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, but only reported 836,000 sales for The Ultimate Weight Solution while the publisher reported 2.5 million copies in print. Shoppers at major bookstores and at outlets like Wal-Mart fit different profiles, and a book like The Ultimate Weight Solution is more likely to sell in non-traditional outlets.^[2] Extremely popular titles, such as the Harry Potter books, sell well everywhere. For Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, BookScan recorded sales of 4.1 million on the first weekend in the United States, while the publisher Scholastic reported 6.9 million copies sold.^[4]

BookScan also under reports titles that sell heavily in church markets. According to Publishers Weekly, BookScan reported 1.5 million copies sold of The Purpose Driven Life, while its publisher Zondervan, reported sales of 11.2 million.^[2]

[edit] Use of BookScan

BookScan was initially greeted with skepticism, but is now widely used by both the publishing industry and the media.^[2] Publishers use the numbers to track the success of their rivals. The media uses the figures as a reference to gauge a title's success. Daniel Gross of Slate has noted the increase of pundits using the figures to disparage each other.^[1]

BookScan also provided previously unavailable metrics on books published by multiple publishers, such as classic novels in the public domain which may be published by many different houses. Previously, no single entity had figures for the sales of these books; publishers and bookstores only knew their own sales. Slate noted that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was available from Amazon in 130 different editions; prior to BookScan there was no way to tabulate total sales. By summing BookScan data, however, Pride and Prejudice was reported to command sales of 110,000 a year, nearly 200 years after being published.^[3]

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Andrews, Kurt & Napoli, Philip (2006), “Changing Market Information Regimes: A Case Study of the Transition to the BookScan Audience Measurement System in the U.S. Book Publishing Industry”, Journal of Media Economics 19 (1): 33-54 .