The folks at Amazon have just unveiled a seductive piece of eye-candy called the “Election Heat Map of 2012” that categorizes 500 top book titles as either “red” or “blue,” and then breaks out current book-buying data state-by-state, offering a near-real-time look at which political books are more popular where. Right now, 56% of the political books being purchased are “red” and 44% are “blue”–and the accompanying map suggests that people in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington, DC are the only ones swimming against that trend, with Pennsylvania the only state with neutral reading interests. At the same time, Barack Obama’s long-selling “The Audacity of Hope” is outselling Mitt Romney’s “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” by a margin of 2-1 in the last thirty days.
The heat map is fun to look at, but has to be taken with a huge spoonful of salt. First of all, Amazon’s system for classifying books leaves something to be desired. “We classify books as red or blue if they have a political leaning made evident in book promotion material and/or customer classification, such as tags,” they explain. While many titles clearly have a political slant, quite a few are written by or from an apolitical point of view (I’m thinking of books like The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates or The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, which Amazon classified as “blue”, or Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln, which is ostensibly just a work of history, but a top “red” book, according to Amazon, no doubt because of how much its position near the top of the best-seller list reflects how much O’Reilly has been plugging it to his TV audience).
And the map shouldn’t be taken as predicting anything about the election. The network theorist Valdis Krebs has been studying political book-buying habits on Amazon for years, and I’m eagerly awaiting the latest edition of his network map of political books, which is built on top of Amazon’s “people who bought this book also bought X” data.
I asked him for his take on Amazon’s heat map and he said, “Just because more red books are sold in a state does not mean that state will go red. I do NOT read a single political book myself, nor does anyone in my family, though we vote in every election, including primaries, and locals. So, I would NOT use the Amazon map as a predictor of the election.”
He added, “Also, strong cliques, especially those that feel ‘excluded’ or ‘attacked’, often do more to ‘circle the wagons and maintain their train of thought, than larger majority groups, who are not so focused on maintaining ‘message’ and membership, and who may be more loosely organized.” Indeed, Amazon itself adds this disclaimer: “Just remember, books aren’t votes, so a map of book purchases may reflect curiosity as much as commitment.”
August 21, 2012