Predicting Bestsellers

Last month, the publisher Simon & Schuster announced a partnership with a Web site called MediaPredict, which would use the collective judgment of readers to evaluate book proposals. The deal drew scorn from many, who saw it as evidence that publishers, in an era of stagnant sales, had so lost confidence in their own judgment that they were reduced to the methods of “American Idol.” Asking readers to weigh in on a book’s commercial prospects was a recipe for mediocrity, and the experiment was “doomed to fail.” Yet even the idea’s critics recognized that it was a response to a real problem: most books today are not economically successful, which means that much of the time and money that publishers invest in projects is wasted.


Read the rest of James Surowiecki's New Yorker article.