Be afraid. Be very afraid.
This 2008 election map colors each state of the Union according to the book-buying habits of its residents on Amazon.com in the past 60 days. To calculate each state’s red and blue percentages for the map, Amazon has classified books as red or blue if they have a political leaning made evident in book promotion material and customer classification. They’ve also prepared a list of “purple” books—materials that have both blue and red appeal.
If reading choices predict voting patterns, aiiiieeeee!Â
Don’t forget to visit the 29th Manila International Book Fair at SMX Convention Center (beside the Maul of Asia), Bay Area, Pasay City. It opened Friday, and will end on Tuesday evening. Exhibit hours 10am to 8pm. If you plan on buying a lot of books, turn up on Tuesday before closing time. The exhibitors will want to get rid of their stocks, so they’ll probably offer bigger discounts.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
September 15th, 2008 at 02:56
This map can also be misleading since Amazon.com and maybe to an extent their brick-and-mortar counterparts, Borders Books & Music make these tallies and generate the statistics. What it doesn’t account for are the buying attitudes of the consumers who are considered “blue”. Those readers tend to support the smaller and more independent bookstores. Those bookstores are more likely to have their lit on the shelves anyway–sometimes with better discounts than Amazon. I believe that the attitude also carries through when they purchase online. I should know–I still buy my blue-leaning lit at either one of the stores in the University of Washington strip, at my neighborhood bookseller on the island I live in, or at Eliott Bay Bookstore. Same thing follows online. There are smaller, more independent online sellers that have the books I want too.
September 15th, 2008 at 15:44
flyover country.
September 17th, 2008 at 23:48
i wonder what the book-buying attitudes of Filipinos will show?