Charles on… anything that comes along

The wife was on BBC TV earlier this week, talking about her new book.

We then watched the “Amazon effect”, as the book’s sales ranking rose, and kept rising, as the evening went on. (Why the evening, not the day? Do people save their purchases until they get home? Do they tape BBC Breakfast and watch it at the end of the day?)

What’s frustrating, though, is that there’s not an easy way to track the sales ranking over time, at least from the UK site. Over at Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools, he points to a service called Junglescan which will do exactly that, with a graph - but only for things on the .com site.

I did write an Applescript/shell script hack that would find the sales ranking of any given book, but it really needed (grr) broadband to be useful; then you could run it at the same time each day, or every hour. I could revive it, but if anyone could point me to a pre-written bit of PHP or other code that would get the sales ranking of a book from Amazon UK, I’d be grateful.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The long tail, shortened from 57 per cent to... about 20 per (15 August 2005; score: 84.74%)
• The long tail, best gadgets for Xmas, and how a Canadian island may foretell the fate of the Amazon (1 December 2004; score: 59.14%)
• Done a book review on Amazon? .... oh, so you have (18 November 2005; score: 45.2%)