There is no John Galt - and that's worse


syrakusos

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Respecting the influence of AS, I don't think library checkout statistics mean anything for this kind of novel. Not the kind of thing libraries stock for it's not the kind of thing librarians have a natural predilection for.

That's an understatement...

There is no group of government workers more rabid liberal democrat than librarians.

Greg

No. the mainstream journalists are.

--Brant

yes, they are "government workers"

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It just isn't there, Brant. Maybe 20,000 HB a year, $39.95 retail $26.05 from Aglialoro (best price) #19,734 in Books at Amazon

Every public library in America has Atlas on their shelves. Several hundred have HB copies of a dumb book I wrote in 1990.

Best year for Atlas was 2008, down in 2009, then fell off sales charts, less than 100,000 paperbacks per year.

They do? Not my 1960s experience, anyway. And 20,000/yr is respectable although I admit not enough.

Some key elements of the novel are dated and, so too, the greater psychological sophistication of the culture generally flies against the lack of that in the novel. Qua read, there is too much creak. For pure Randian literary enjoyment I now prefer The Fountainhead. We the Living?--too Soviet-reality real for me now, an American. There is nothing so old and gone today as the Soviet Union, now represented by the clown state of The Peoples Republic of Korea.

--Brant

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Respecting the influence of AS, I don't think library checkout statistics mean anything for this kind of novel. Not the kind of thing libraries stock for it's not the kind of thing librarians have a natural predilection for.

If we knew the hardcover sales, that would be interesting. If you buy the paperback and it grabs you, you're likely to go get the hb because the pb font size is so small and you want to get more into the ideas.

It just isn't there, Brant. Maybe 20,000 HB a year, $39.95 retail $26.05 from Aglialoro (best price) #19,734 in Books at Amazon

Every public library in America has Atlas on their shelves. Several hundred have HB copies of a dumb book I wrote in 1990.

Best year for Atlas was 2008, down in 2009, then fell off sales charts, less than 100,000 paperbacks per year.

Total book sales rose 1.0% in 2013 over 2012, to $15.05 billion, at the 1,211 publishers that report results to the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot program. The adult book category managed to show a 0.8% increase in the year despite the blockbuster numbers turned in by the Fifty Shades trilogy in 2012. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/61667-book-sales-rose-1-in-2013.html

Suppose the average price was $15 (mass market, trade paper, discount HB). That's 1 billion books a year not Atlas.

Ditto movie box office, $40 billion in 2011-2014 to date. Atlas I, II, III were insignificant, 0.00025% of sales.

Barack Obama Audacity of Hope (2006); Dreams From My Father (1995)

Weeks on NYT Best Sellers List: 270, Total copies sold: 4,650,000

Wolf,

Where are you coming up with these sales figures,"less than 100,000 paperbacks per year."? That conflicts with the ARI figures of 300,000 to 500,000 annually, depending on which of the last 4 0r 5 years. ARI admitted that they give around 100,000 free to schools. Even so, that would mean sales of 200,000 to 300,000 (at least). I'm rounding the reported figures off, here.

So, just for the sake of speculation, if the 100,000 figure is the more accurate, that would mean that ARI is (deliiberately?) inflating the annual sales of Atlas by a factor of 2 ro 3, or more.

This reminds me, very uncomfortably, of the reports of inflated sales figures for the books of L. Ron Hubbard. Allegedly, scientologists go into bookstores, buy-up Hubbard's titles, especially Dianetics, but also his novels, and return them to Bridge Publications to be sold again to bookstores, thus inflating sales figures to push Hubbard's titles onto the "Best Sellers" lists... Or so some critics of Scientology have claimed..

.

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Where are you coming up with these sales figures,"less than 100,000 paperbacks per year"?

Publishers Weekly (retail and online cash book sales)

as for ARI conflating 501c charity and "sales"...

Here's great news: because of the $1 million donation that ARI received earlier this year, to be earmarked for the free books program... ARI expects to distribute 300,000 books this year [2005]. http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?s=50fc4fa372532ae1a60a3c37c658f5e9&showtopic=4940#entry99784

Some 22,000 high school and college students this year submitted entries to essay contests on her books and, in the past year [2006-07 school year], teachers have requested over 300,000 copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged to use in their classrooms. http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1007/1007aynrand.htm

As of 2007, ARI has distributed over 700,000 free copies of Rand's novels to high schools around the country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_movement

Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was “to keep Rand alive.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The Ayn Rand Institute says it has given out more than 2.5 million copies of Rand's novels and that an estimated 65,000 high school classrooms have taught Rand's works since its Books to Teachers program began in 2002. Teachers receive the books for free if they agree to teach the novels in their classrooms. http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2012/08/teachers_request_ayn_rand_books.html

More than 400,000 copies of Ayn Rand's books, including "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," have been ordered for use in the classroom. Ayn Rand Institute's Books to Teachers program reported that in the 2011-12 school year, teachers requested 30% more books than the year before. http://www.smartbrief.com/08/24/12/more-teachers-are-using-ayn-rands-books-classroom#.VBh-xBZSPIU

Free Objectivist Books http://freeobjectivistbooks.org/

Ayn Rand Education free books http://freebooks.aynrandeducation.org/order/default.aspx

Free copy of Atlas Shrugged http://studentsforliberty.org/blog/2011/06/27/want-a-free-copy-of-atlas-shrugged/

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Where are you coming up with these sales figures,"less than 100,000 paperbacks per year"?

?? Scroll uo to your post #24, September 14. Or my post #28, above, which also copies your post.

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Where are you coming up with these sales figures,"less than 100,000 paperbacks per year"?

Publishers Weekly annual "Facts & Figures" book sales by category (nonfiction, adult fiction, YA, children, etc)

The cutoff for reporting is 100,000+ copies per year. Over 200 books listed in adult fiction 2010-2014. Atlas isn't one of them.

Best year was 2008 paperback, down slightly in 2009, then -- poof -- fell off the stats, selling less than 100,000 per year.

The meme about "selling" 400,000 a year is ARI propaganda, refers to their free giveaway programs -- see #39 above

Altruism at its finest.

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I have not used the Ingram Warehouse Freddie line system in a while, so I don't know if it still works as before, but this system was pretty accurate at calculating book sales in the past.

Anyone interested can see how to do it here: Book sales - PARC and others.

Michael

Thanks for the link. Cumulative 18 months (?) and a fudge factor couldn't top 100,000+ sales for Atlas.

from MSK's linked post:

High-end estimate for 2005-2006

The Fountainhead: 139,930

Anthem: 137,080

Atlas Shrugged: 87,510

We the Living: 9,730

Publishers Weekly (which I quoted) uses Nielsen BookScan, point of sale data from a number of major book sellers. Nielsen BookScan's US Consumer Market Panel currently covers approximately 75% of retail sales and continues to grow. Hudson Group's airport and train and bus locations were added to their reporting panel effective week 1, 2009. [Wikipedia]

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2005 - 2006 ??

Sorry, not particularly relevant.The sales reportedly took off after the 2008 ctash and more so after Obama was elected.

2008 - high water mark: 200,000 sold (per ARI press release quoted by Glenn Greenwald)

2009 - 148,695 paperback (+ 50,000 hardcover maybe)

2010 - less than 100,000 paperback

Disinformation from ARI claiming 300,000 pulp giveaways of Atlas are "sales" is just that -- disinformation.

They've been doing it since 2002, buying wholesale and pretending Atlas is a bestseller. It isn't and never was.

2009 bestseller - The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown: 5,543,643 hardcover and mass market sales

2010 bestseller - Stieg Larsson (2 titles): 10,942,000 mass market and trade paper sales

Atlas debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List at #13, remained on the list for 22 weeks in 1957

Hardcover sales 70,000 copies in first 12 months; paperback (1959) 70,000 copies first 12 months.

1957 bestseller (tie) - By Love Possessed, James Gould Cozzens: three editions, Hollywood movie (Lana Turner)

Hardcover sales 500,000 copies in first 12 months; Readers Digest Condensed version 3 million copies.

1957 bestseller (tie) - Peyton Place, Grace Metalious: on NYT list 59 weeks, Hollywood movie, sequel, TV series

Hardcover sales 20 million copies; Dell mass market 12 million copies.

1959 bestseller - Exodus, Leon Uris: biggest bestseller in two decades, Hollywood movie (Paul Newman)

Translated in 50 languages; more than 30 million copies sold worldwide.

Bottom line: ARI has given out 3 million copies of Rand's novels free, almost 1/3 of all cumulative "sales."

If her estate's book royalties were big money, why did Peikoff constantly beg for 501c contributions?

8 million books (all titles) divided by 78 years in print = 102,500 per year all titles

The Fountainhead did well before and after the movie was released; Atlas didn't until NBI pushed it.

Subtract 2 million sold in the salad days and 3 million giveaways = 60,000 per year all titles

-------

EDIT 9/17/14 - looking at this again, it don't think it's right. Revised my thinking because I got confused about sales of Atlas Shrugged vs all titles. The truth is somewhere between 8 million and 25 million cumulative sales all titles. Maybe 12 million? = 150,000 per year all titles (average of 78 years). Subtract 2 million sold in the salad days, 3 million giveaways = 200,000 per year all titles (50 years). Too high.

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Wolf,

Sales of thrillers and other non-philosophical novels (i.e. not advocating/describing a new system of thought, such as Rand's Objectivism), such as Patterson Rowling, Dan Brown, etc. are interesting, but not germane to this issue.. Patterson has sold over 30 million, J. K. Rowling, even more, but so what? No one, not even ARI, is claiming that Rand is the best selling author of all time.

.

But if the figures you are quoting are accurate (actual sales figures or estimates?), then the ARI yearly estimates are way off. They (ARI) say that they donate something over 100,000 to schools, but that is around one-third of what they also claim to be sales figures to the public. If they are indeed doubling or tripling "real" sales figures since 2008,......well, then.

For an organization that claims to represent a new philosophical/ethical system, one that emphasizes among its premier virtues; honesty, and integrity, the assertion that they have been intentionally deceiving the public, seriously - possibly - irretreivably, damages their credibility. Gross understatement.

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Jerry,

After these efforts to give the appearance that Atlas Shrugged was more influential and/or preferred than other books, I never pay any attention to "official" stats coming from Objectivists. That's a general rule I hold for myself. Even on RoR, there is a section called Activism and when I used to post there, I remember at least one campaign to skew the results of a survey. They didn't call that sleaze. They called it "activism."

For some reason, integrity, honesty, etc., do not apply for a lot of people in our subcommunity when it comes to voting in public surveys. Also, after watching the false inflated sales numbers preached by acolytes during the PARC debacle, and after jumping through the hoops with Ingram's Freddie line system, I just don't trust any information of that nature coming from Objectivist circles, especially on the orthodox side.

What's worse, after studying marketing and propaganda (public relations) for several years now, I get really turned off by the sheer amateur clumsiness of their efforts. When a person is novice-level incompetent, arrogant about it and congratulates himself on his cunning, and he is not a character in a comedy, there is only one word I know of to properly characterize that: dork. :)

I do believe the sales of Atlas Shrugged are unusually high for a novel that was released in 1957 and my gut tells me the movies help boost those sales a bit, but not as much as is claimed in O-Land. It would be interesting to run all the stats again, but I'm feeling lazy. :)

Michael

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Jerry,

After these efforts to give the appearance that Atlas Shrugged was more influential and/or preferred than other books, I never pay any attention to "official" stats coming from Objectivists. That's a general rule I hold for myself. Even on RoR, there is a section called Activism and when I used to post there, I remember at least one campaign to skew the results of a survey. They didn't call that sleaze. They called it "activism."

For some reason, integrity, honesty, etc., do not apply for a lot of people in our subcommunity when it comes to voting in public surveys. Also, after watching the false inflated sales numbers preached by acolytes during the PARC debacle, and after jumping through the hoops with Ingram's Freddie line system, I just don't trust any information of that nature coming from Objectivist circles, especially on the orthodox side.

What's worse, after studying marketing and propaganda (public relations) for several years now, I get really turned off by the sheer amateur clumsiness of their efforts. When a person is novice-level incompetent, arrogant about it and congratulates himself on his cunning, and he is not a character in a comedy, there is only one word I know of to properly characterize that: dork. :smile:

I do believe the sales of Atlas Shrugged are unusually high for a novel that was released in 1957 and my gut tells me the movies help boost those sales a bit, but not as much as is claimed in O-Land. It would be interesting to run all the stats again, but I'm feeling lazy. :smile:

Michael

The Orthodox school of Objectivism just tends to be toxic to the core, unhealthily so. The "neo" faction, such as this site, is magnitudes better.

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the assertion that they [ARI] have been intentionally deceiving the public, seriously - possibly - irretreivably, damages their credibility. Gross understatement.

Anything I say will be ignored or forgotten. NY Times reported Rand's estate as being worth $500,000 at her death in 1982, much of which was cash salted away in a savings bank. If it weren't for Medicare and successful cancer surgery, she might have ended her life penniless. How much sense does it make that she sold 25 million books? -- or 30 million?

Folks claim that there's been a huge resurgence. Massive sales must have occurred recently, except they didn't register at BookScan.

400,000 people paid to see Atlas I ... about 240,000 for Atlas 2 ... 60,000 for Atlas 3 so far (expected to close at 150,000). Attendance at Atlas Part I strongly suggests that 400,000 people bought five million Ayn Rand books in the last decade, which is preposterous.

In reality, ARI's donors gave away almost three million* in the last decade. Bookstore sales average maybe 150,000 per year all titles.

------

* Two years ago, Education Week reported:"The Ayn Rand Institute says it has given out more than 2.5 million copies of Rand's novels since its Books to Teachers program began in 2002." Other free Rand book handouts are cited and linked in post #29, supra. In 2012, ARI gave away 400,000 copies -- 2/3 of the number widely said to be sold annually -- although in this 2010 press release Yaron Brook claimed that combined sales of Ayn Rand’s four novels totaled more than 1,000,000 copies in 2009 (sales that were oddly invisible to Publishers Weekly and BookScan.)

I don't mind being proved wrong. Should be easy to prove I misread the data.

For instance, in August 2009 New York Times reported: "In the first six months of 2009, Penguin Books shipped more than 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged" (25% more than all of 2008). But that makes me wonder -- shipped how many to bookstores? and how many to ARI?

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Ending life "penniless" is just one risk of living. Medicare didn't save Rand from poverty for that type of one-off surgery. It could have if other problems had appeared. What needs to be understood about Medicare is its crowding out of private insurance and regimentation of medicine and the role it has played in crowding up costs.

Considering the cost of "The Ayn Rand Letter" and the number of years it ran and likely readership, I'd guess that most of her estate came from that. She might have had enough income from other sources to have paid her modest cost of living for a Manhattan resident. By that I mean if she had continued with "The Objectivist" instead of shutting it down.

The estate was not sophisticated in that all its assets could have been trust hid and not subject to probate. Maybe some were. Who knows? The beneficiaries.

--Brant

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"What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wolf wrote:

It was wonderful to read each new issue as it appeared in my college library. The good old days, ink and paper.

end quote

The good old days are diminishing and not thriving, but still abound here on planet earth. I have a system of two lamps, one on each side of my lazy-boy that keeps my eyes from growing tired. Perhaps books will last another hundred years if we dont grow tired of buying them.

I recently bought some books at Barnes and Noble and read them. Then I took a shopping bag full of those new books, many of them hardbound, to a small town library which refused to take them! However another library did take them for redistribution and sale.

What if we have a monstrous solar flare? What will happen to our knowledge stored electronically? I think that creating only electronic versions of knowledge is very dangerous. Paper back and hardbound books are in danger of burning, but their dispersal into individual units could keep many of them in existence even after a catastrophe.

Remember Ted Cruz reading during his filibuster? Is a book still a book if it comes from a nook? I do not like internet green eyes and spam. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am. I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere!

Well, perhaps I could learn to like green eggs and ham if I ever buy a reader. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.

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"What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wolf wrote:

It was wonderful to read each new issue as it appeared in my college library. The good old days, ink and paper.

end quote

The good old days are diminishing and not thriving, but still abound here on planet earth. I have a system of two lamps, one on each side of my lazy-boy that keeps my eyes from growing tired. Perhaps books will last another hundred years if we dont grow tired of buying them.

I recently bought some books at Barnes and Noble and read them. Then I took a shopping bag full of those new books, many of them hardbound, to a small town library which refused to take them! However another library did take them for redistribution and sale.

What if we have a monstrous solar flare? What will happen to our knowledge stored electronically? I think that creating only electronic versions of knowledge is very dangerous. Paper back and hardbound books are in danger of burning, but their dispersal into individual units could keep many of them in existence even after a catastrophe.

Remember Ted Cruz reading during his filibuster? Is a book still a book if it comes from a nook? I do not like internet green eyes and spam. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am. I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere!

Well, perhaps I could learn to like green eggs and ham if I ever buy a reader. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.

Come the "monstrous solar flare" electronic books will be the last thing you'll be thinking about.

--Brant

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A speech to say that we are all John Galts (okay, maybe not everyone :tongue: )

I believe that it is only possible for each individual to be their own John Galt, and that no one else can do it for us. And since each individual is the only one who possesses the power to enslave themselves... we are also the only ones who can free ourselves.

Greg

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I believe that it is only possible for each individual to be their own John Galt

Now, that's just plain silly. You and I don't have a hope in hell of inventing a new, limitless energy source.

There is no way to unwind the New Deal or to reverse its destructive career. Detroit is gone. Chicago and St. Louis are next. Fifty years ago, there was a valid debate about the direction of public policy. Rand and Rothbard were ignored. Now it's too late. Prepare for hardhearted combat. [COGIGG, p.49]

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I believe that it is only possible for each individual to be their own John Galt

Now, that's just plain silly. You and I don't have a hope in hell of inventing a new, limitless energy source.

Well, there's actually no need to, Wolf... when I already have an old limitless energy source.

Just a simple wood stove, and over 10,000 acres of firewood right outside my front door. :wink:

Greg

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