| | Phil,
Someone here has to know his or her way around the publishing biz a little better than I do.
My limited understanding is that reliable sales figures for most books aren't available from any centralized source. Authors get royalty statements and (assuming there's been no finagling) they can arrive at the correct numbers. But that information is, as you noted, highly dispersed. And publishers aren't inclined to give it out to just anyone who asks.
12 to 13,000 is considered really good sales, for a university press book. (Academic books often sell in the hundreds... including all the copies bought by libraries.) You shouldn't assume, by the way, that copies bought by libraries will "gather dust." Some books may sit on a shelf without being checked out for 50 years; others may have people waiting in line to read them. On the average, though, one should assume that each library book will have multiple readers. Publishers do, and their pricing policies reflect that assumption. If they think most copies of their book will be bought by libraries, they charge more.
How many copies of The Russian Radical (outside of libraries) were bought by non-Randians is definitely worth knowing. But how would you find out? People who buy books aren't normally given a user survey to complete... or a reasonable incentive to return one. You could go to the Humanities Citation Index or the Social Sciences Citation Index, see how often RR was cited, and then sort out the articles or books by non-Randians that cited it from the articles or books by Randians. Somewhat interesting, but tedious, and not the whole story.
For perspective here: Rand's fiction has massively outsold her nonfiction. And most (or is it all?) of her nonfiction, in turn, has outsold any nonfiction works about her philosophy written by others. Does anyone know approximate sales figures on Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand? Do they even exceed the sales figures on Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology? As a trade paperback with marketing muscle behind it, in the same series as Rand's own nonfiction, OPAR would have to lead the pack by quite a margin.
More perspective: How many copies of Tara Smith's new book will need to be sold, to get the impact that she is seeking? The publisher slapped the $80 tag on the book because it expects most copies to go to libraries, and a few to go to academics who are willing to shell out for a personal copy. (Most Randians are unlikely to buy it until it goes paperback.) If a couple of thousand copies were to be picked up by non-Randian academics, wouldn't that do the job?
Last bit of perspective: How many units of Mr. Valliant's book have been purchased by non-Randians (not counting libraries)?
Robert Campbell
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