After reading Carl Bialik's column at the Wall Street Journal, I keep wanting to repeat the same mantra: Amazon has little impact on book sales. Oh, it's great when authors try to manipulate numbers, and sometimes - think Maddox or Hugh Hewitt - a "bestseller blast" of tens of thousands will propel the books in question to the top of the Amazon list, but when such figures account for maybe 5% of total sales, how seriously can we really take these numbers?

Fortunately, Bialik gives that side some credit (even after buttering up Ruder Finn for their PR blasts.) "The targeted marketing campaigns contribute volatility to sales-ranking numbers that are inherently unstable," he writes. "Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart. Morris Rosenthal, an author and publisher based in Springfield, Mass., who has studied the Amazon charts, says a day without a sale can send a book ranked 10,000 to as low as 50,000." Well, yeah. Which is why, if the rankings aren't completely meaningless, they don't mean all that much...