[From Rick Marken (01.03.07.1440)]
As you may know, Amazon.com assigns a sales rank to each book
listed at its site. I presume this is just the ranking in
terms of sales of the book through Amazon. But the numbers are
interesting because they give some idea of how well PCT books
are doing with respect to all the other books sold via Amazon.com
as well as with respect to each other.
According to Amazon.com, the highest ranking PCT book is Powers'
_Making Sense of Behavior_ with a sales rank of 165,205. The next
highest ranking goes to Cziko's _The Things We Do_ with a sales
rank of 291,924. Next comes Powers' _Behavior: The control of
Perception_ at 340,435. Then there is a big gap in sales rank and
we get: Marken, _Mind Readings_ at 636,349; Runkel, _Casting Nets_
at 644,480; Robertson/Powers, Introduction to Modern Psychology
at 663,145; and Powers, Living Control Systems at 1,269,206
So what does all this mean? Well, it means that people are not
buying nearly enough PCT books (through Amazon.com, anyway). It
also means that people who "believe in" PCT should be telling
their friends to buy some of these books, through Amazon.com or
some other web source, since these books are not readily available
in bookstores. I think it also suggests that those who teach PCT
or subjects relevant thereto (which includes just about everything
in the social and behavioral sciences) should be having their
students use these books as textbooks in their classes. PCT fans
who teach experimental psychology, for example, should assign
either _Mind Readings_ or _Casting Nets_ as one of the textbooks.
Although the Amazon.com rankings probably do not reflect much
in the way of textbook sales, I don't think there have been
any bulk (class size) orders of many of these books and there
should be.
Best regards
Rick
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Richard S. Marken Phone or Fax: 310 474-0313
MindReadings.com mailto: marken@mindreadings.com
www.mindreadings.com
