VeryWellSaid.com
General Help and Explanations
Table of Contents
- Data Sources and Collection Methods
All book data are retrieved from Amazon.com using the Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) Application Programming Interface. Except for relatively static data (such as title and author) book data are normally retrieved twice a day, so dynamic data such as sales rank, price, customer rating, number of reviews, and used-book data are generally recent.
To see the exact timestamp of the request that produced the book's dynamic data, view the book's details section (click the 'Details' link in the middle column). The request timestamp is the last detail item displayed.
The Amazon E-Commerce Service is imperfect and sometimes returns inaccurate data. In general, we depend on outside sources for the data used to generate this web site so we cannot guarantee the data's completeness or accuracy.
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- Amazon Sales Rank
Amazon's proprietary measurement of how well an item is selling at Amazon relative to other items in the same product line. (Examples of product lines include Books, DVDs, Electronics, etc.) A sales rank of '1' is applied to the best-selling item in a product line.
VeryWellSaid.com only tracks book sales, so sales ranks (and sales rank gains and losses) are directly comparable across book-topic categories.
Sales Ranks for many best-selling items change on an hourly basis.
Click on the column's Up or Down arrow to sort by sales rank.
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- Average Customer Rating
The average of all Amazon customer ratings of the book to date. The
possible rating values are integers from 1 (star) to 5 (stars); 1 is
the lowest rating. The book's detail section (to see the detail
section, click on the 'Detail' link in the main column) includes the
number of reviews from which the average rating was calculated.
(Average Ratings derived from fewer than 5 reviews show the superscript
'1'.)
Click on the column's Up or Down arrow to sort by customer rating.
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- Category
VeryWellSaid.com tracks the sales rank of top-selling books in many highly focused content categories that are of particular interest to our readers, as well as in 29 broad Amazon topic categories.
Custom topic categories. VeryWellSaid.com tracks top sellers in many highly focused content categories and new categories are added every week. Generally, the more focused the topic, the more useful it is for prospective book buyers or people otherwise interested in the topic. Though imprecise, such categorization schemes allow people interested in a topic to find relevant books very quickly.
Amazon topic categories. Amazon categorizes books into broad content categories. These categories are hierarchical and a top-level category is comprised of many descendent categories. (A list of the top-level Amazon.com (USA) topic categories, and all their descendent sub-categories, can be found here
.)
VeryWellSaid.com. currently tracks top-selling books in 29 broad top-level Amazon content categories (e.g., Cooking, Medicine, Sports, etc.).
Note that the books in a category (either an Amazon category or a custom category) are not exclusive to that category: a given book may be included in many different categories. For example, a biography of a business leader may be included in the Biographies & Memoirs category and the Business category, as well as in other categories.
An alphabetical list of all top-seller categories at VeryWellSaid.com is available here.
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- Read Customer Reviews
The number in the "Read Reviews" column on any of the main topic pages is the total number of customer reviews for that book to date: it links to a reviews page which displays the most recent fifty Amazon.com customer reviews for that book. These are the same customer reviews which you can read on the Amazon.com web site, but more are displayed per page.
On the reviews page you can page through all of the customer reviews for a book, fifty per page and newest to oldest, by clicking "Next" or "Prev", or you can change the sort type and direction and page through the reviews sorted by customer rating, the number of people who found that review helpful, or by review date.
On the reviews page you can hide the reviews themselves and view only the review summary data (that is, the review title, book rating, and the number of people who found the review helpful) by clicking "Show Summaries Only". Clicking "Show Full Reviews" displays the full reviews in addition to the summary data.
VeryWellSaid attempts to publish new customer reviews of a book within a day after the new reviews appear on the Amazon.com website. (With respect to the older reviews, the only data that can potentially change on a daily basis is the "Number of People Who found This Review Helpful" and these data are updated every weekend.) Each review displays a last-updated timestamp at the end of the review.
Due to the large volume of review data and multiple data-update methods used, there will often be discrepancies between a book's total-review-counts, as they are variously displayed on the main topic page in the "Read Reviews" column, or in the book summary section at the top of each reviews page, or in the navigation section of the reviews page.
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- Sales Rank Gain or Loss
The most-recently retrieved sales rank of a book is compared to its past sales rank (if available), over a number of periods. A sales rank gain is displayed in blue with a positive sign. A sales rank loss is displayed in red with a negative sign. For example, a book with a current sales rank of 10, that yesterday had a sales rank of 100, has a 1-Day sales rank change of + 90 (sales improved). SalesRank data is normally retrieved twice a day.
Sales rank data are continuously tracked for a wide range of books in each category, including especially less popular books, to insure that sales change data will be available for comparison when less popular books quickly become best sellers.
Click on the 1-Day, 7-Day, or 30-Day sales rank change columns' Up or Down arrows to sort by the respective sales rank changes.
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- Amazon Price
The current Amazon price of this book if purchased at Amazon.com (from Amazon itself, not from an Amazon merchant partner or an Amazon Marketplace seller). Does not include shipping fees or taxes, if applicable.
The price is accurate as of the date/time indicated in the details section. (To see the detail section, click on the 'Detail' link in the main column.) Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.
Click on the column's Up or Down arrow to sort by price.
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- Search This Page Only
Search This Page Only only searches for books on the current best-seller page, not on the entire site. (To search all of VerywellSaid.com, use the Google™Site Search Box immediately above Search This Page Only.)
As you type in the search box, the number of matches in the specified book-description category (Titles, Authors, ISBNs, or all three--as specified in the Page Search Options) are displayed beneath the search box. Enter ISBNs without spaces or dashes. Clicking 'Search' highlights the rows (in red) in which the match was found. The matched term will also be highlighted (in yellow) inside the book details section of the row.Searches are not case-sensitive, only the current page is searched, and terms are matched wherever they are found embedded in the target category's text. (The text doesn't have to start with the search term.)
Each time you click 'Search' the page is first reset to normal by clearing any prior searches\highlighting, and then only the rows (if any) matching the current search term are highlighted.
Clicking 'Reset' resets the page to normal and clears the search box.
Click 'Show Page Search Options' to show the search options.
Search Options
- You can search Titles, Authors, ISBNs, or all three.
- If 'Show Details' is checked, the detail section of matching rows will be displayed.
- If 'Go to First Match' is checked, the browser will jump to the first matching row.
- If 'Hide All Details First' is checked, the browser will also close any detail sections you opened manually, independently of searching, before it highlights matched rows on 'Search' or resets highlighted rows on 'Reset'.
- If, after clicking 'Search', you then change the search category (e.g., from 'Titles' to 'Authors'), the page will be reset, but you will still need to click 'Search' again to see the rows in which matching Authors were found.
Note: Search This Page Only is not created by, nor in any way affiliated with, Google™, even though the Google™ Site Search Box is immediately above it. - Bookmark Pages at VeryWellsaid.com
Members of "social bookmarking" sites (such as "Del.icio.us") can bookmark web pages at VeryWellsaid.com by clicking the corresponding bookmarking-site link on the page they wish to bookmark.
Such sites typically allow users (who have established accounts at those sites) to store and categorize the user's web-page bookmarks-- in a single, centrally-accessible web location independent of any browser or computer--and also share their bookmarks with others.
In general, if you wish to support VeryWellSaid.com, the best way to do so is to link to it!
You can also bookmark a page directly in your web browser (i.e., inside Internet Explorer) by clicking the first link in the series: "In browser".
For reference, you can read the Wikipedia.org article on Social Bookmarking here.
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- Subscribe to Pages at VeryWellSaid.com
A RSS Syndication Feed (or "channel") allows a web site publisher to automatically distribute frequently updated content such that feed subscribers do not need to visit the web site directly in order to read it. Rather, subscribers can read the syndicated content in a preferred or alternate format, either with special programs called "feed readers" (such as "FeedDemon"), or via browser-based online feed-aggregation services (such as Google Reader, Bloglines.com or My.Yahoo.com), or or even directly in browsers by navigating to the feed address.
For example, you can use your browser to view directly the feed for the The Top-Selling Influenza Books by clicking here. (Note that feeds are primarily designed to be read by machines: though web browsers can typically display the feed information, some browsers will format the information much better than others.)
You can always view a VeryWellSaid.com RSS feed directly in your web browser--and obtain the url of the page's feed--by clicking the "XML" text link in the series of links following "Subscribe[?]".
VeryWellSaid.com publishes five feeds for each of its top-selling book categories: Top-Sellers, Highest-Rated Top-Sellers, Biggest 1-Day Sales Gainers in Top-Sellers, Biggest 7-Day Sales Gainers in Top-Sellers, and Biggest 30-Day Sales Gainers in Top-Sellers. An alphabetical list of all top-seller categories, including the urls of their feeds, is available here.
For reference, you can read the Wikipedia.org article on RSS Syndication here.
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Email a Page Link
You can email a link to someone by clicking the 'Email' link in the pop-up window. Required fields include: 'To Email Address', 'From Email Address', and 'Your Name'. (Information you provide will not be used for any purpose except to email a link to the recipient.)
If you'd prefer to use your computer's client email program instead or the provided form, click on the corresponding link at the bottom of the 'Email' form to launch your email cleint, and then enter the recipient's email address into the email draft that pops up.
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- Link to a Page
Click on the 'Link' link in the pop-up window, and you can obtain either the url (web address) or the HTML code for linking to a page at VeryWellSaid.com. You can copy and paste the url in the first textbox (titled "Link") into an email or instant message. Alternately, you can embed the HTML link code in the second textbox (titled "Link Code") into a web page you are building.
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Legend (for superscripts)
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1The Amazon.com Average Customer Rating for a book was calculated from fewer than 5 reviews.
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