Nielsen BookScan

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]

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 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.

Methodology

Nielsen BookScan relies on point of sale data from a number of major book sellers. Nielsen BookScan's US Consumer Market Panel currently covers approximately 75% of retail sales and continues to grow. BookScan does not track sales from Wal-Mart/Sam's Club or BJ's; Hudson Group's airport and train and bus locations were added to their reporting panel effective week 1, 2009.^[5]

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]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Daniel Gross. "Why writers never reveal how many books their buddies have sold." Slate, June 2, 2006. Retrieved on January 5, 2008.
2. ^ ^{a b} Jim Milliot and Steven Zeitchik. "Bookscan: Acceptance, And Questions, Grow." Publishers Weekly, January 12, 2004. Retrieved on January 5, 2008.
3. ^ ^{a b} Adelle Waldman. "Cents and Sensibility; The surprising truth about sales of classic novels." Slate, April 2, 2003. Retrieved on January 5, 2008.
4. ^ Anna Weinberg. "Nielsen BookScan Releases Potter Sales Figures." The Book Standard, July 21, 2005. Retrieved on January 5, 2008.
5. ^ http://www.bookscan.com/uploads/fs_USAConsumer%20Market_Jan09.pdf

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, doi:10.1207/s15327736me1901_3 .

External links

• Nielsen Retail Measurement Overview