Trouble with Physics runaway bestseller after Smolin's Unique Universe appears

[Martin]

In June 2009 the IOP (inst. of phys.) published an essay by Smolin in their wide-audience magazine Physics World. The essay called The Unique Universe brings out some new ideas about the universe.

 

It seems to have gotten a good reception. Anyway something has driven the sales of Smolin's book way up. I just checked and the salesrank was 852 compared with Brian Greene's books 2539 and 3817.

 

The five most popular stringy books had average salesrank 6936. So Smolin was doing 8 times better. That was at 11 PM pacific time on 2 July.

There haven't been any radio or TV appearances that I know of, all he has done that could possibly boost sales is put this piece in Physics World.

(PW readers are all kinds of physicists, students, techies, engineers and kindred sorts. It's for science trained but no one specialty. My guess is that these PW readers got interested in what he has to say and are buying the book. If you know of some other thing that might explain the jump in sales, please mention it.)

 

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Anyway, you might like to check the article out.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/39306

 

It was picked up by a science/technology blog called X-Journals which commented favorably in a post titled "Forget the So-Called Multiverse: One Universe is Enough".

http://x-journals.com/2009/lee-smolin-forget-the-so-called-multiverse-one-universe-is-enough/

It could be the string landscape/multiverse idea has gotten into bad odor---enough science people may dislike it that, by coming out against it, Smolin cause a jump in his booksales. I noticed a simultaneous jump in sales of the hardcover edition as well as the paperback.

[Reaper]

Do you have any statistics on how well this book is selling towards the general public at large, rather than just the science-savvy people? Last I checked most around me were far more familiar with Steven Hawking, or even Brian Greene or Kaku, than Lee Smolin.

[Martin]

Do you have any statistics on how well this book is selling towards the general public at large, rather than just the science-savvy people? Last I checked most around me were far more familiar with Steven Hawking, or even Brian Greene or Kaku, than Lee Smolin.

 

Reaper, I'm glad someone else is interested in this too!

 

I don't understand this big jump in sales. I just now checked at 5PM pacific time, July 3, and the book was at overall salesrank 833, it was the #3 amazon bestseller in physics. I think this has to include some wider sector of the reading public.

 

833 is pretty good for a physics book (you are competing with all kinds of more popular genres)

 

For comparison, at the same time (5PM) Brian Greene's fabric and elegant were 2286 and 3520. Kaku's hyperspace and parallel worlds were 4588 and 6347. So you can see 833 is real good.

 

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You mentioned Greene and Kaku in your post. I absolutely agree they are much more familiar names than Smolin out there in the general public----TV series and all that. But just at the moment Smolin's book is suddenly outselling them. And Hawking too. Odd. Probably just a brief flukey spike, but what caused it? How does a science book get such a burst of sales?

 

If you would like to watch this curious phenomenon yourself, here is the amazon physics bestseller list

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/227399/

If you click on one of the books there, you will get a product description page for that book which gives its current salesrank plus lots of other information.

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Consecutive posts merged

Today (5 July) at noon the Smolin book's salesrank was 352 (amazon-wide book sales rank).

 

This was 16.1 times better than the topfive stringy books. Their average salesrank was 5667.6.

 

The five currently most popular stringy books were elegant, fabric, parallel, hyperspace, and idiot's guide. I make a regular routine of checking at noon pacific time and always using the five most popular string books as a benchmark for comparison.

 

Earlier this summer the Smolin book was doing a modest 0.5 or 0.7 of par. It was only half or two-thirds as good as the benchmark. Now it is 16 times better. This jump in sales is sofar unexplained and I'm wondering why it happened. Did anybody see anything on Television? Or on these Digg and Twitter things?

Edited July 5, 2009 by Martin
Consecutive posts merged.

[hewj11]

Just to throw this in here: I got the book for my kindle an haven't been flying through it. Its a very fluid read and he doesn't stick with one side of an argument. It can really be read by a layman or someone in the field.

enjoy