As BookScan Grows, So Do Questions

by Steven Zeitchik, with Jim Milliot, PW NewsLine -- Publishers Weekly, 1/9/2004

When Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken were arguing last month about who had sold more books, online muckraker Matt Drudge stepped in with the final word by citing an inviolable source: BookScan.

The point-of-sale data service run by Nielsen and owned by Dutch conglomerate VNU (a competitor of PW parent Reed Elsevier) is on its way to becoming a standard-bearer in an industry starved for hard data. In the space of a few years, it has gone from a sputtering pipe-dream to a recognized tool, used in everything from settling a celebrity debate to setting the price of a rights-sale. With Penguin becoming one of the last of the large houses to sign up, publishers have firmly embraced the system.

But while the media and the industry increasingly cite BookScan, questions have cropped up about how accurate a picture it paints--and how it might be misused . Agents in particular have been ambivalent, saying editors too often wield it as a blunt instrument in negotiations. As publishers become increasingly likely to use it, anecdotes abound of agents who play down BookScan numbers to them. "It's not bad in and of itself," says Trident Media's Robert Gottlieb. "But some editors, especially less experienced ones, over-rely on the system. Editors shouldn't be using it unless they're supervised by other people in the house with other information."

So how representative are the service's numbers? An informal survey of the top-selling books of 2003 showed some surprising things.

BookScan generally claims to represent between 70% and 75% of sales in the industry (Wal-Mart and some of the supermarket chains are among those who decline to report.) But a comparison with in-print figures supplied by publishers reveals that the numbers are more likely to represent about 65%, even after deducting for unsold books and returns.

For BookScan's top ten nonfiction titles published last year--a list that include mass-market favorites like Phil McGraw's diet books as well as indie hits like Benjamin Franklin: An American Life--no title had BookScan sales comprise more than 75% of total sales. For some of the books that had strong special-sales, they ran as low as 25%.

The range of coverage is shown by three Simon & Schuster books. The service was very close to the numbers reported by S&S for Franklin (BookScan, 384,000; S&S, 550,000 before returns) Figures for Living History diverged a bit more (BookScan, 1.1 million; S&S, 1.8 million.). The biggest discrepancy came for The Ultimate Weight Solution by Phil McGraw (BookScan: 836,000 copies; S&S, 2.5 million). Showing an even further disparity was The Purpose-Driven Life, which the publisher said sold more than 11 million copies last year but charted only 2.4 million. In the same vein, Bill O'Reilly's Who's Looking Out for You sold 430,000 copies on BookScan, while Doubleday Broadway cites an in-print number of nearly one million.

Publishers say the huge gap is due to the sales of the book outside BookScan channels, not just at Wal-Mart but at smaller independents, the religious market and grocery chains. The Purpose-Driven Life, for instance, sold millions of copies at Christian Booksellers Association stores, which do not report to BookScan.

Nielsen BookScan's Tim King said the service is striving to add more stores. It currently has about 400 independents; it also recently added Follett. The drug stores, he said, can be a problem because they don't always scan according to ISBN but he hoped to also add there. He does not expect Wal-Mart and Sam's stores to change their policy of not sharing data with Nielsen.

The service is proud of its point-of-sale tracking, saying it eliminates the messiness that can occur when sales are weighted, as they are in many bestseller lists. But pinpoint accuracy can also be a disadvantage. Bulk purchases made by an author, for instance, will all register as separate sales, while when independents buy a hot book like Harry Potter at a steep discount and then resell it, it can end up counting twice.

Still, many houses say they are learning to recognize the system's limits and work within them. Some say the numbers can sometimes help in predictive ways, as they did at Rodale, where publisher Amy Rhodes said that the sell-though numbers from the service gave her the confidence to repeatedly hit the reprint button on The South Beach Diet, all the way up to the current five million. "I couldn't have managed South Beach without BookScan," she said. King emphasized that figuring out the best uses could take time. "We've only been on-line a couple of years," he said, "There's a learning curve."

Most the industry say BookScan is better than a typical bestseller list but that it remains a far cry from a royalty statement or a definitive gauge like companion Soundscan. "It's not perfect. But it's a usable tool. The more numbers you have, the more likely you are to find the truth between them," says agent William Clark. In other words, the only reliable thing you can about book sales trackers is that none are fully reliable.