[pydotorg-www] Permission to edit PythonBooks wiki page

[dibya]

Thanks for giving me editing rights to the Wiki.

I welcome your observations wholeheartedly as it helps me address
shortcomings of the site, if any.

You are right that Amazon has no information about direct sales from
publishers and subscription services. But assuming that popularity of a
book is consistent across different platforms of sale, this should not be
an issue. It can be argued that Amazon's rankings are in fact better
because people have to pay for each book (I only use Bestseller Ranks of
paperbacks and not Kindle ebooks).

Of course, we cannot ever prove anything conclusively. Therefore, the best
check of the quality of rankings is ultimately qualitative - and I have
verified with my limited amount of research that the rankings on
pythonbooks.org do reflect popular opinion. If you want to verify this, you
can do something simple. Just check the lists on pythonbooks.org and see if
the books that you liked the most over the years are consistently ranked
well on the website.

And if you indeed do this, let me know if you spot any glaring
discrepancies.

Best regards,
Dibya

On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 3:01 PM, Mats Wichmann <mats at wichmann.us> wrote:

> On 11/12/2017 06:25 AM, dibya wrote:
> > Thanks for your response. The bestseller rank indeed means the Amazon
> > Bestseller Rank. I understand the reasons you mentioned about why this
> rank
> > might not be the perfect way to rank the books - and that public voting
> > might be better. However, I went ahead ahead with this choice for the
> > following reasons:
>
> > 2. From my experience, it seems that the Amazon Bestseller Rank, with all
> > its faults, is still a very good indicator of quality. How do I know
> this?
> > Well, I visited several online threads about best Python books for
> > beginners, intermediate programmers, books on specializations like Data
> > Science, Security etc. and made a list of books that people
> wholeheartedly
> > recommend. Then I compared this list with what I get from the Bestseller
> > Rank. It's astonishing how well the two lists match up in almost every
> > case.  My conclusion from this is the following: you can promote a book
> all
> > you want, but if you want strong sales, quality beats promotion.
> >
> > 3. The third point is about books not on Amazon. I do believe this
> applies
> > to only a small minority of Python books. According to my database,
> Amazon
> > currently lists 1005 paperback Python books published since 2009. This
> is a
> > quite complete database and all the popular books are definitely on
> there.
> > I do understand that I might have missed one or two books that are not on
> > Amazon, but that's a compromise that I was willing to make (because the
> > alternatives were far inferior is terms of cost-benefit).
>
> Not trying to argue, just making personal observations:
>
> I get nearly all of my tech books at the moment electronically directly
> from Packt.  At some time in the past I had a company-paid subscription
> to Safari and those books arrived electronically as well.  I'm assuming
> Amazon was never involved in any way in either set of transactions,
> unless there's some kind of API where you can inject a record of a
> "sale", though that's a particularly nebulous concept in the case of
> subscription services, which I think are a significant factor
> particularly in tech book sales - and probably cause "total downloads"
> to be not indicative of quality: if an individual book is effectively
> free, people grab it and then quickly ignore it if it's bad.  Maybe
> Amazon's numbers are still representative on a proportional basis, I
> don't know.
>
>
> Anyway, there's nothing to prevent you from being marked as a wiki
> editor, which is now the case.
>
>
>
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