We get a distorted view of the popularity of movies and books by their rankings. A movie generates $15,500,000 in it's first week-end. At $5 a ticket, that means that 3,100,000 out of the 280,000,000 in the US, and 30,000,000 in Canada watched it. 1 out of every 100 people watched. It's a hit.
Books the numbers are even more drastic. You could literally have 1 in 400 people buy your book and be #1. So, it is very easy to not know anybody who bought a "runaway" best seller.
Thanks for the explanation
It's scarier than that. I remember hearing once that only one American in ten buys a book over the course of a year. And of that ten percent, only ten percent buy more than one book per year. And then you look at the best-seller lists, and you realize that what they're mostly buying are diet books and trashy fiction (under which category you could probably put Franken's book)
Seriously, the more that Al Franken...Michael Moore...BOB MULHOLLAND...etc..are out in front of the public, the BETTER for us!! The LA TIMES and Bob Mulholland helped surge Arnold to VICTORY!! Keep it up meanies!!