As we have demonstrated pretty definitively over the past two weeks, the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service has shown their hourly Kindle “best seller” list — and therefore the entire “sales rank” system — to be a fiction of merchandising rather than a ranking of titles by actual, paid individual unit sales. Not only are subscription “reads” counted towards the sales and best seller rank, but now that participants have seen the effect on their own sales, it’s clear that even subscription “checkouts” are counted. (So as soon as a KU member downloads a title, that counts towards […]