If wishes were horses and book sales were ballots…
Consider this a thematic follow-up to my earlier discussion of the book Gaming the Vote, in which we addressed the niche movement to revamp our voting practices by phasing out single winner plurality voting.
Obama surges in book sales [read story]
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
Fri Feb 29, 3:02 PM ETNEW YORK – Maybe it’s the prose, or the charisma, or the novelty. But if voter excitement were measured by book sales, then Sen. Barack Obama would be the clear front-runner.
Sales have exploded in 2008 for the works of Obama, the Illinois Democrat who has steadily climbed in the polls all year. Sales have stayed flat for the works of Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who quickly and surprisingly became his party’s presumptive nominee after he seemed finished last summer.
[...]
According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of industry sales, combined sales for Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope” were averaging more than 35,000 a week in late February, more than triple the pace of early January, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was still favored to be the Democrat nominee.
“Dreams From My Father,” a memoir, first came out in 1995; “The Audacity of Hope,” a political book, in 2006.
Meanwhile, McCain’s sudden prominence has had no discernible impact on “Faith of My Fathers,” a highly praised, best-selling memoir released in 1999, and on “Hard Call,” a book about character in public life first released last August and out in paperback with a printing of 50,000. [...]
Weekly sales for Clinton’s memoir, “Living History,” have also averaged 1,000 or less throughout 2008. The book was a near-instant million seller when published in 2003.
Thankfully, nobody is seriously proposing to gauge voter preference in this way, otherwise Stephen Colbert [check catalog] would surely own the Democratic front-runner position1 instead of a failed candidacy (his Presidential aspirations were painfully dashed in South Carolina last November). So clearly, the entire notion is thoroughly farcical.
Measuring voter preference according to a candidate’s Yahoo! Buzz index, however…well, it’s only a matter of time. Those who resist will be the first against the wall when the Yahoo! Revolution happens.
