Over on Jeremy Lassen’s LiveJournal, he says:

According to Nielsen BookScan, 93% of books sold fewer than 1,000 units in 2004, accounting for just 13% of sales volume. The remaining 7% of books accounted for 87% of sales. Jim King of BookScan brought these illuminating statistics to light last week at The Book Standard Summit. Here’s the full article.

This statistic is trotted out every year, is it not? And every year people get their panties in a bunch over it.

But relax, the sky isn’t falling, as Andrew Wheeler astutely points out:

I suspect some serious disingenuousness behind that statistic. Let’s take a closer look at it…

The exact quote is “93 percent of ISBNs sold fewer than 1,000 units in 2004, according to Nielsen BookScan.” Now, he didn’t say the universe was of books published in 2004, but of ISBNs, which includes every book in print, and plenty of books that are now out of print (ISBNs have been standard worldwide since 1970).

So what he’s actually saying is that, in this one given year, only 7% of all of the books published since 1970 moved more than 1000 units. This is not particularly controversial.