Kindle Unlimited’s effect on the bestseller list has indeed grown.
Kindle Unlimited titles have been removed from the Digital Book World E-book Bestseller list due to an inability to sort out retail purchases from Kindle Unlimited “reads” when creating the list.
After discussing several possibilities with Amazon as to how to include titles that had robust sales but also had reads on the new e-book subscription platform counted toward Amazon Kindle sales ranking, no solution was found. The conversations were constructive and amicable but, ultimately, not successful.
The issue is that the DBW E-book Bestseller list draws data from other bestseller lists, including the Kindle bestseller list. The list is meant to be an index of what book buyers are purchasing most and how much they’re spending each time they do so. If “reads,” where the user isn’t paying to purchase a book each time, are counted toward bestseller rankings on the Kindle list and they are unable to be separated out from regular purchases, then it would be unfair to include those titles on the list.
Had those titles been included, they would have elevated several Amazon Publishing, self-published and back-list e-books onto the bestseller list, including “Mockingjay”, “The Giver”, “Rhett” by J.S. Cooper, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and more.
A consistent No. 1
“The Fault in Our Stars” is No. 1 on the DBW E-book Bestseller list for the twelfth week in a row. According to Pearson’s latest financial report, Green sold nearly 5.5 million copies of his books in the U.S. alone in the first half of the year.
Bestseller Prices
Because of the kinds of books available in Kindle Unlimited that had to be removed from the DBW E-book Bestseller list, the average price of a bestselling e-book has shot up this week to $8.45, an increase of almost $1 from last week’s $7.57. All of the books on the DBW list are currently “big five” titles.
E-book bestsellers from the week ending 7/26:
1. “The Fault in Our Stars”, John Green, Penguin Random House, $4.99
2. “The Goldfinch: A Novel”, Donna Tartt, Hachette, $6.99
3. “Invisible”, James Patterson; David Ellis, Hachette, $8.99
4. “The Heist: A Novel” (Gabriel Allon Book 14), Daniel Silva, HarperCollins, $13.99
5. “The Book of Life: A Novel” (All Souls Trilogy), Deborah Harkness, Penguin Random House, $11.99
6. “Gone Girl: A Novel”, Gillian Flynn, Penguin Random House, $8.52
7. “Act of War: A Thriller”, Brad Thor, Simon & Schuster, $12.99
8. “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”, Laura Hillenbrand, Penguin Random House, $4.99
9. “Chill Factor: A Novel”, Sandra Brown, Simon & Schuster, $1.99
10. “If I Stay”, Gayle Forman, Penguin Random House, $4.99
See the complete list of this week’s top 25 e-book bestsellers at Digital Book World.
Jeremy Greenfield is responsible for managing all editorial content on DigitalBookWorld.com, including the DBW Expert Publishing Blog, the Digital Book Wire and editorial email and social media communications. Prior to joining Digital Book World in October 2011, Jeremy spent three years as a careers editor at FINS.com. Jeremy lives and works in New York City and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
