The Year in Best-Sellers

"Why can't they just count up all the books that have sold?" a friend once asked me when I described the Times' baroque method for calculating its list. But books aren't movies, which are made available in a limited number of theaters that are able to instantly report the number of tickets they dispense over the film's opening weekend. Books slowly make their way to a bewildering number of outlets, ranging from small gift shops, book fairs, and drugstores to big-box retailers, many of whom can't or won't provide timely and accurate figures. CEOs and the pastors of megachurches, as well as certain political figures, have been known to buy, directly or indirectly, crates of their own books to give away to friends and associates. Those books are certainly sold, but not to individual readers with a genuine interest in them, so those sales don't tell us much about how popular a book truly is. Then there are e-books, the leading retailer of which, Amazon, refuses to release sales figures.