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As of Wednesday, Barnes & Noble's bricks-and-mortar stores will post their own bestseller list. The Times' bestsellers will be upstaged at the front of stores by displays of B&N's own bestsellers. (Discounts offered to customers on the books -- 20 percent for paperback, 30 percent for hardcover -- will remain the same for both lists.)

Does B&N's demotion tarnish the credibility of the Times list? Insiders at the Times describe the bookseller's decision as mere muscle-flexing: B&N's way of announcing that it is in the driver's seat of the book industry. Other members of the publishing industry don't think B&N has eroded the clout of the Times' list. "The Times is still the Times," Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal said. "Certainly there are more bestseller lists today than there were five years ago, and everybody tries to read into those lists as much as they can to benefit their books. But there is something about the Times -- at least you know that care and thought goes into this. That gives it a tremendous cachet."

To collect and analyze information for the bestseller list, the Times uses its news survey department, which also handles joint polling projects with CBS. In a recent interview, news survey editor Michael Kagay explained how he puts together the bestseller list. The Times draws on sales figures from questionnaires filled out by hundreds of stores across the country, stores of different sizes and demographics, as well as wholesalers such as cost clubs and, recently, e-commerce sites. The Times does not, however, survey specialty shops such as mystery bookstores or children's bookstores.

"Basically, the list is done in the same way that public opinion polls work," says Kagay, a 12-year veteran of the Gray Lady who is a former Princeton professor with a background in political polling. "It's very much the same methodology. It depends on random sampling and checking every week to see that all the regions of the country are properly covered and the size of the stores are properly covered. You've also got to make sure that the ratio of the chain bookstores to the independent bookstores is right. If chain sales and independent sales equaled 100 percent, the ratio would be roughly 60 percent chain, 40 percent independent." (The American Booksellers Association estimates that the ratio nationwide is closer to 57/43.)

But how in touch with recent bookselling trends is the Times list, especially given that the last five years have been arguably the most volatile in the industry's history? "Every four to five years we do a census so that we have an idea at any given time of how many there are, what size they are, what volume of business they do," Kagay says. "We ask some other questions, like 'Do you use computers in your store?' At any given time, we have a pretty good picture of the retail bookselling universe in the United States."

Though this four-to-five-year gap between censuses may make the Times' sample seem like a statistical Rip Van Winkle, Kagay makes the case that his department still pays attention to important shifts in the bookselling universe, and will make changes between censuses when it deems them to be appropriate. "Independents used to dominate the book market, but a couple of years ago, it tipped in favor of the chains." It was as a result of this shift, Kagay said, that the Times modified the ratio of bookstores it polls to the current 60/40 split. It has also posted an independents' bestseller list on its site. (There is an interesting Times phenomenon: Even though J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series now occupies the first, second and third places on its list, the books' sales are probably undercounted because the Times doesn't survey children's stores).

Next page | Booksellers say, "Too little, too late"