In addition to selling the most print books in 2019 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, Where the Crawdads Sing also sold the most e-books and audiobooks last year, and in impressive fashion—selling more than one million units in each format. The e-book and audio numbers come from Bookstat, which was founded by Paul Abbassi and computes online sales for millions of e-books, audiobooks, and print titles daily by tracking their relative rankings across thousands of retailer category lists and calibrating them against real-time feeds of daily sales of hundreds of thousands of titles provided by partner publishers. Abbassi said that on average in a given week, Bookstat’s figures vary by 1%–4% from actual sales marketwide.
This is the first collaboration between PW and Bookstat. Starting with the month, we will be running weekly e-book and audiobook bestseller lists based on Bookstat data, and we are planning other ways to analyze the data to gauge what is happening in the market.
