Given the comment about the 20/24 books, wherein most books “only showed a difference of a few copies in the two time periods,” I suspect that his data *doesn’t* reach statistical significance.

Just saying X or Y happens, without testing to determine whether X or Y is reasonably within the realms of chance, is fruitless. Perhaps that was merely something left out of this blog article, but given the comment noted above, I suspect the tests were done and the author preferred to ignore them in favor of keeping his “20 out of 24″ numbers, which make it seem as though there is more heft to the anti-freebook side of the argument.

(Computer problem; I apologize if this post goes through in duplicate).

Publishers do not report to Bookscan. It’s way more convoluted that that. The booksellers or shippers (middlemen, bookstores and some but by no means all, outlets) report their sales to Bookscan which then provides their sales reports to publishers.

Ha, nitpicking noted Will keep in mind for future articles

If the book is available on, say, Podiobooks, then does this increase or decrease the numbers? Scott Sigler and others seems to have had great success by podcasting the book first and then releasing (through a publisher) the print version. There are so many factors involved, though, that I’m not sure you could say with any certainty what effect ‘giving it away’ has had.

I’ve made an updated post at

http://www.johnhiltoniii.org/update-on-random-house-books/

that includes the sales of the 5th book that I previously had not found. @Andrew, I concur with your comment. In my blog I linked to an article detailing the capabilities of Bookscan. I believe that Wikipedia also gives a fair assessment about Bookscan’s capabilities; I am not aware of a better method to collect data as to the question of how free book releases affect sales.