From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Amazon Lists Best Sellers on Dozens of Campuses (Chron of
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 1999 12:18:08 -0500
Friday, September 3, 1999
A New Amazon.com Service Lists Best Sellers on Dozens of Campuses
By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
At the United States Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., Army readers
have put aside interservice rivalry long enough to make The Complete Guide
to Navy SEAL Fitness the No. 3 best seller. At Florida State University,
recently ranked as the nation's top "party school" in the Princeton Review's
annual college guide, the five best-selling volumes are hard-core
computer-geek tomes, including UNIX Power Tools and Core Web Programming.
So said a new feature on Amazon.com this week. The on-line bookseller's Web
site now includes "purchase circles," which list best sellers at selected
organizations -- including dozens of colleges and universities, from Abilene
Christian University to Yale.
The company says it "creates Purchase Circle lists based on groups including
at least 200 Amazon.com customers," and it makes no claim that the lists
accurately represent reading habits at any institution. Still, the lists
are irresistible.
At Michigan State University, for instance, the top three books were Tricks
of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You're Doing It; The
Craft of Research; and The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape
of a Teacher's Life. But in the No. 4 slot was Star Wars Episode I: The
Phantom Menace. A how-to called Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a
Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis
turned up on several lists, including those of Arizona State and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At Yale, the top seller was Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York
City, 1928-1942 -- which in Amazon.com's overall sales rankings came in
143,655th. Poetry fared poorly everywhere except Amherst, where the list
included Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems and What the Body Told, a
book of verse by Rafael Campo, who teaches medicine at Harvard.
At some institutions, meanwhile, readers are looking inward. Third on the
list at Cornell University was Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the
American University. At the California Institute of Technology, the No. 4
seller was The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character,
about the research-fraud accusations that ensnared the biologist and Nobel
laureate David Baltimore, who was eventually exonerated. He is now Caltech's
president.
But no list was more fascinating than West Point's. Besides the fitness
guide, the list included Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of
Thermopylae, at No. 1, along with special-interest titles like The
Commanders and Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. The West Point
ranking wrapped up, however, with a run of three literary greats that was
unmatched by any other institution's list -- Brideshead Revisited,
Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Catcher in the Rye.