"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

A New Look--A New Year

After fussing around with my blogger template for altogether too long, I've moved on to a new template.  Hopefully, this one is pleasing to the eye and easy to read.


I've taken this opportunity to start off the new year with my quarterly Amazon sales rank statistics.  As is often the case, the values are bouncing around quite a bit.  New titles like Rose's Plone 3 for Education and Williams' Plone 3 Theming are doing well.  Aspeli's Professional Plone Development is still holding its own.  Plone Live (Pelletier & Shariff) is at the top of the graph, but that's an artifact of their online sales that bypass Amazon.  In fact, many Plone titles are published and sold by Packt directly, which probably dilutes their sales ranks. 


3 comments:

Lennart Regebro said...

Ooooohhhh... Your graph is upside down! You might want to mention that because that's not what you expect, and it makes absolutely no sense, and your comments becomes very confusing. Why would Plone Live be on top of the charts becaus ethey bypass Amazon! Makes no sense! Until you realize you've made the graph upside down...

You should probably change that.

Schlepp said...

The graph actually is right-side up; its sales ranks that are upside down. A sales rank of 1 means you're Amazon's top seller. A sales rank of 500,000 means that half a million other books out sold you. Low on the graph is good; top of the chart means slow sales.

Yes, it is confusing. See last quarter's posting (http://plonemetrics.blogspot.com/2009/10/more-stats-from-amazon.html), especially the link to Rosenthal's article.

Lennart Regebro said...

Amazons rank is a rank, not a sales figure. Hence it's the right side up for a rank, that is, a low number is a good number. But ranks are typically rendered with low number at the top. You don't. and that's what is confusing.