A few weeks ago I wrote a story about a book, How Would A Patriot Act? , by a relatively obscure blogger, Glenn Greenwald, and how it had shot to the top of the Amazon sales charts without the benefit of advertising, promotion, or reviews. Amazon executives told me they had no good explanation for it, although they believed their ranking system had sufficient safeguards against bulk purchases or other attempts to game the system. So the success of How Would A Patriot Act? appeared to be a legitimately new phenomenon of blog-powered book sales. Now, a number of bloggers on the Left are delighted that the book will appear on the New York Times paperback bestseller list on June 11; you can see an image of the page here . The question I have is that How Would A Patriot Act? is the only book on the list about which the Times notes that “some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.” I’m not suggesting that there is anything untoward going on, but does anyone know how big the bulk orders are and where they might be coming from?
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