I checked my books on Amazon (yes, I do this on occasion) and noticed that ARM was around #5000, a fairly typical ranking for it. I also noticed something I hadn’t seen before, which was a ranking by category. It’s #11 among statistics books, which actually is pretty good, considering that #1 is the Tufte classic, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (I prefer Cleveland’s The Elements of Graphing Data (which Amazon amusingly puts in the “graph theory” category), but Tufte’s great too), and after that come three trade books (including Fooled by Randomness), Statistics for Dummies, two guides to the high school AP statistics exam, two intro stat books, and the Cartoon Guide to Statistics. And then ARM! It’s been out two years, and we’re still beating out How to Lie with Statistics, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Statistics, the Statistics Cliff Notes, Intermediate Statistics for Dummies, and other classics.
P.S. I’m pleased to see that Fred Mosteller’s Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions is still holding in there at #23. I love that book, and it’s a real bargain at $6.95 (unless of course you’re one of the majority of people in the world living at subsistence level, in which case this is $6.95 that you’d probably be better off spending on food, fuel, or booze).
P.P.S. I was amazed to see that Len Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk has received 78(!) reviews, and amused to see that Discovering Statistics Using SPSS has received 65 reviews. Was there really so much to say about it?
P.P.P.S. BDA is way down there at #49. But I’ll always remember that for a brief shining moment it was ranked #430 in all of Amazon.
P.P.P.P.S. These are just Amazon rankings, not total sales. I’m sure that there are many stat textbooks at the intro and intermediate levels that sell more books than ARM, but through college bookstores rather than Amazon.
Impressive rankings nonetheless. I'd guess that a higher proportion of people who have bought ARM have reviewed it than the proportion of buyers who have reviewed DSU-SPSS. (In part because DSU-SPSS has been out for a longer time, it's the 3rd edition on Amazon, and the reviews are all from earlier editions). It also appears that the ARM reviews are more varied than the DSU-SPSS reviews.
I've found that if a book goes out of stock on Amazon, they don't sell it, but they stack them up. When it comes back in stock, it gets a brief big boost up the rankings as X of them fly out the door in a couple of hours.
[Disclaimer: Andy Field, author of DSU-SPSS is a friend of mine, so I'm not going to say anything bad about it.]
P.S. Did you see that SPSS is changing its name to PSAW. Given that the book came out a few days ago (the Amazon date is wrong), I think the publisher is annoyed.
P.P.S. There's an Amazon Andrew Gelman store. I didn't know that.
The list must vary quite a bit over time because BDA is now 21 and ARM is 17.