# Finding Amazon's Best Sellers

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 22, 2010, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003 "2010-01-22T16:56:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/1 "2010-01-22T16:56:12Z")

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On [amazon.com](http://amazon.com), is there a way to see what are their top-selling (and bottom-selling) titles in each category?

Thanks.

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**Author:** ![cuberdon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/45deac/32.png) [@cuberdon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cuberdon)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/2 "2010-01-22T18:20:21Z")

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Bestsellers:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd\_dp\_ts\_b\_1](http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_dp_ts_b_1)

Couldn’t find worst sellers.

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**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/3 "2010-01-22T18:31:43Z")

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> [@LouiseE](#):
>
> Couldn’t find worst sellers.

That would be because there are too many of them. Do you really want a list of the tens of thousands of books that only sold one copy last week? Or the hundreds of thousands that sold zero copies?

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**Author:** ![anson2995](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@anson2995](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anson2995)\
**Post date:** [January 23, 2010, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/4 "2010-01-23T14:19:28Z")

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> [@Giles](#):
>
> That would be because there are too many of them. Do you really want a list of the tens of thousands of books that only sold one copy last week? Or the hundreds of thousands that sold zero copies?

No thank you.

Because Amazon facilitates the sale of used books, they have listing for books that have been out of print for 50 years. (I know this because I listed one for sale last night). As a collector, I’d love to be able to search for books by publication date. They used to have an advanced search that let you search by publisher, etc., but that feature seems to have disappeared.

I’d also love to be able to search for used books by price, ie, show me all baseball books listed for $0.01, or all books from \<1950 for less than $1.00.

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**Author:** ![cuberdon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/45deac/32.png) [@cuberdon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cuberdon)\
**Post date:** [January 26, 2010, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/5 "2010-01-26T18:54:21Z")

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> [@anson2995](#):
>
> No thank you.
> 
> Because Amazon facilitates the sale of used books, they have listing for books that have been out of print for 50 years. (I know this because I listed one for sale last night). As a collector, I’d love to be able to search for books by publication date. They used to have an advanced search that let you search by publisher, etc., but that feature seems to have disappeared.
> 
> I’d also love to be able to search for used books by price, ie, show me all baseball books listed for $0.01, or all books from \<1950 for less than $1.00.

[http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Search-Books/b/ref=sv\_b\_0?ie=UTF8&node=241582011](http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Search-Books/b/ref=sv_b_0?ie=UTF8&node=241582011)

You can’t search by price, but you can sort on it.

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**Author:** ![Mr.Slant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c57346/32.png) [@Mr.Slant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Slant)\
**Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/6 "2010-01-27T13:55:10Z")

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> [@Giles](#):
>
> That would be because there are too many of them. Do you really want a list of the tens of thousands of books that only sold one copy last week? Or the hundreds of thousands that sold zero copies?

The count of books [counted by edition, not printing or title] that HAVE sold at least once is above 8 million.  
The last time Amazon disclosed the number, some years back, there were twice as many books without sales ranks as with, which at the time means there were 12 million books without ranks.  
I’d hazard a guess that the catalog has been as large as 20 million titles, although they did some bulk non-ISBN-book catalog mergers last year.  
Want to know what the sales ranks mean?  
Here’s a chart from 3 years back:

..  
Rank Last sold about  
200,000 2 days ago  
660,000 7 days ago  
1,020,000 14 days ago  
1,606,000 1 month ago  
2,700,000 2 months ago  
3,014,000 3 months ago  
3,950,000 1 year ago  
..

As the catalog has gotten bigger, I’d multiple the numbers on the left side by 120% to compensate for time.

Cite: Amazon poster lumahai at [Amazon](http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=131652) , post made Mar 10, 2007 2:23 PM

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**Author:** ![Mr.Slant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c57346/32.png) [@Mr.Slant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Slant)\
**Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/7 "2010-01-27T14:10:39Z")

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> [@anson2995](#):
>
> No thank you.
> 
> Because Amazon facilitates the sale of used books, they have listing for books that have been out of print for 50 years. (I know this because I listed one for sale last night). As a collector, I’d love to be able to search for books by publication date. They used to have an advanced search that let you search by publisher, etc., but that feature seems to have disappeared.
> 
> I’d also love to be able to search for used books by price, ie, show me all baseball books listed for $0.01, or all books from \<1950 for less than $1.00.

anson,

FTR, I’ve seen catalog pages dating back to 1898.  
PS- The book in question, which I wanted to sell online, is only worth about $2 on Amazon. Old don’t mean valuable.

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**Author:** ![anson2995](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@anson2995](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anson2995)\
**Post date:** [January 27, 2010, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-amazons-best-sellers/526003/8 "2010-01-27T16:32:54Z")

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> [@Mr.Slant](#):
>
> anson,
> 
> FTR, I’ve seen catalog pages dating back to 1898.  
> PS- The book in question, which I wanted to sell online, is only worth about $2 on Amazon. Old don’t mean valuable.

True.

And there are books on Amazon [that date back to the 16th century](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0020MY0F2/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&qid=1264609518&sr=1-5&condition=used)… although very often books older than 1900 are either a) a typo, or b) the bookseller [confusing the date when the original version was published](http://www.amazon.com/Canterbury-Tales-geoffrey-chaucer/dp/B002ZFOXWE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264609807&sr=1-2) and when their copy was.