The Best Buyer's List...

It's easier than I'd ever realized to buy your way onto the best seller's list.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544.html

I mean, on some level, this is the most basic scam possible in that industry - best seller lists are based on unit sales, so the easiest way to elevate your ranking on such a list is to generate the sales counted... Even if that means buying 5,000 copies yourself (or through intermediaries). The fact that it's not an honest purchase is non-trivial to detect, though. You could go and white-list or black-list buyers for these metrics - but there's a fine line in there. Should a library be buying one copy, or ten, or one hundred? If a university bought 1,000 for "reference purposes", is that valid? (And don't tell me no universities - or even departments or professors - wouldn't be willing to make such a purchase to get a small premium on the check.) And if you have a heavy enough touch on the sales routes to determine more than very basic information, you have potential privacy issues.

Just another of those things, I guess, that I never really considered but is blindingly obvious once you see it.