Amazon have taken a rather novel (hur hur) approach to mapping US politics. They took their 250 top selling books and divided them into a red/blue (Republican/Democrat) categorising system, then looked at the shipping address. The result was the following heat map:
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The map is overwhelmingly Republican, and even thoroughly democratic states like California are painted red. If the electorate pick presidents like they pick their bedtime reading, it looks like Obama will have a problem in November. But of course, they don't.
"Books aren't votes," Amazon says in a statement, "and a map of book purchases can reflect curiosity as much as commitment."
That's true, and it's also the case that people tend to be more curious about views that oppose a party in power than those supporting it.
There might also be differences in the way Republicans and Democrats market their books. Simba Information analyst Michael Norris told Wired: “I can tell you that there are conservative imprints and conservative publishers that are just brilliant at figuring out what kind of books their audience wants to read. There just aren’t aggressively left-leaning imprints like that.”
Business Week also questioned Amazon's way of dividing red from blue. Here's how Amazon explain it:
We take the top-selling political books on Amazon.com and categorize them as 'red,' 'blue,' or neutral. 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.
..and here's Business Week taking issue:
What makes a book blue or red? Perusing the Amazon (AMZN) list, some designations may leave you scratching your head. Sure, Klein’s The Amateur is an unsympathetic portrayal of Barack Obama (part of the book’s description reads, “The Amateur argues that Obama’s toxic combination of incompetence and arrogance have run our nation and his presidency off the rails”). But other books on the red and blue lists defy easy categorization. Can one really say that Robert Caro’s fourth installment of his LBJ biography is necessarily a “blue” book? And even Killing Lincoln, a retelling of the Lincoln assassination written by conservative talk-show host Bill O’Reilly, is not a polemic but a pulpy work of narrative nonfiction.
And finally, a couple of odd decisions in Amazon's maths. Here's how they say they made the map:
We compute percentages, updated daily, for each state and the U.S. by comparing the 250 best-selling blue books during the time period against the 250 best-selling red books during the same time period, including new book launches. If the same book title has multiple formats (paperback, Kindle books and Audible Audio), each format has a separate sales calculation. The list only includes paid, not free Kindle books. All orders during the period are given equal weighting in the calculation. States with higher percentages of red or blue purchases are colored more darkly, and states with an even 50-50 split are colored neutral.