Book sales

Springer-Verlag sent me its annual report about book sales this week and I am quite pleased at how well The Bayesian Choice is (still) doing, considering the French edition was first published in 1992 and the English first edition in 1994! Obviously, the choice made by Springer-Verlag of reprinting the book in a paperback version helped tremendously with keeping the book popular, since they sold 1235 copies since mid 2007, compared with the 2760 copies of the hardcover version sold since the first printing of the second edition in 2001. (This does not include the crate of the very first printing of the paperback lost by the carrier! If you ever see one, let me know!!!) Similarly, the 2004 edition of Monte Carlo Statistical Method with George Casella is doing quite well, with more than 6000 copies sold so far and close to 1000 for last year. I am not certain what the trend will be once the R book with George is published, but I think they will overall aim at different audiences. Last and not least, Bayesian Core (published in 2007) is also faring well with 1987 copies sold to this point, which is rather comforting when considering it came right at the same time as Jim Albert’s Bayesian Computation with R, which is a direct competitor.The next step is in writing a second edition of Bayesian Core adapted to the “Use R” series, including a specific R package, but I think this will have to wait till next year.