Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/04/19/gates_book_hit_or_miss/

Gates book – hit or miss?

It's either number 36 or number 5 in the best seller lists, depending...

By Graham Lea

Posted in On-Prem, 19th April 1999 07:02 GMT

With Gates' second book, Business at the speed of thought, having had nearly a month's exposure to the book buying public, we thought we'd check on how it was doing. It took us some time to spot it in the USA Today best selling books list, where it languishes in 36th position. Surely that's a mistake? We turned to the Wall Street Journal's non-fiction list and found it at 5th position, but the WSJ seems to omit quite a few works from the USA Today list, although any elimination criteria are not stated. We'd like to know what happened to Dr Atkins' new diet revolution (3rd), Dr Atkins' new carbohydrate gram counter (32nd) and Sugar busters! (35th) which are in the USA Today list, but which do not figure in the WSJ list. USA Today claims it uses data from 3,000 bookstores, but as the WSJ only claims 2,500, clearly something funny is happening in the missing 500. It seems that the American public is more concerned with the belly line than Gates' bull. ®