A new list of mood boosting books will come out in May.
In the UK, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (full disclosure: I was a judge a few years ago) has been boosting books in translation for well over 20 years, and if there was ever any lingering resistance to it, blockbusters like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo along with TV hits like The Killing have certainly helped wear it down.
Russ Grandinetti, the Amazon vice-president, says the Kindle has boosted book sales over all.
The process is self-generating: each book sets the stage for a film, which boosts book sales, which lifts sales of Potter products.
Movie versions, of course, always boost book sales, but the burst of interest in this case has enabled the book to monopolize the No. 1 sales spot in Britain for the past couple of weeks.
If previous years are anything to go by, the latest list - announced on Monday - will be accompanied by a long tail of debate, controversy and boosted book sales.
And it's not just e-books that can generate cash, but audio books and translations for different markets, all of which can help raise an author's profile and attract new readers, helping to boost book sales.
The Internet companies expending the time and money to scan millions of pages proffer that their efforts will actually boost book sales by better organizing the books through complete searches of text, making texts available that people didn't know existed previously.
But Google argued that the effort would actually boost book sales by making it easier for readers to find works, while introducing them to books they might not otherwise have seen.
They found all books benefited from positive reviews (obvious); they discovered that well-known authors were negatively impacted by negative reviews (also obvious); they also found that lesser-known authors benefited from negative reviews (a.k.a. bad publicity actually boosted book sales).
