From: "Strong, Lee" <StrongL at MTMC.ARMY.MIL>
To: "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Skiffy Book Club Top 50
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 07:38:44 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

	Ah, folks....  The ranking is a non-issue.  The original news item
says that only the first ten are ranked and the next forty are only listed.
	Personally, I would have placed the fantasy works in a separate
category from sf.  While Professor Tolkien's masterpiece is IMHO the best
fantasy novel written to date, it is not sf and should not be listed as sf.
However, many mundanes can't tell the difference.  I still remember one
librarian who seriously defined sf as "books with funny covers."

-----Original Message-----
From: ronkean at juno.com [mailto:ronkean at juno.com]
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2003 11:49 PM
To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Skiffy Book Club Top 50

On Mon, 3 Mar 2003 18:05:47 -0500 "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net> writes:
>

> Starting with #11, the list is alphabetical by title.
>
> --Ted White
>

That is an astute observation.  What are the chances that the actual
sales rank would precisely correspond with an alphabetical ordering by
title, for 40 titles in a row?  Vanishingly small, I would think.  But
there may be an explanation other than that the information is bogus.
Perhaps the ranking was done by grouping books in sales ranges, and then
the software which reported the results, by default alphabetized the
titles within each range.  For example, sales of zero to 10,000 might
have been the lowest range, 10,001 to 20,000 the next range, and so on.

Ron Kean