The bookstore that banned the bestseller list pulled every chart-topper off its front table and replaced them with staff picks nobody had heard of. The gamble looked like commercial suicide in an industry where the table is the business β and then sales went up.
What the numbers suggest is that the list had become a cage, not a map. People didnβt want fewer books. They wanted someone to choose one for them, and a human behind the counter turned out to be the recommendation engine the algorithm never managed to be.
