I don’t believe anything nefarious happened, but other people might believe that. If the bulk orders are for giveaways and such, the book might simply be a bit less popular than the bestseller status would otherwise suggest :)
Jumping in here — Will is doing a couple events which involved large purchases for attendees, and several university groups also made large orders for Fall 2022 reading groups back in the early summer, when we were driving early sales to ensure the publisher would do a large enough first print of the book. This played an important role in the book not selling out or running low on copies early on (as Superintelligence did, which caused shipping delays on launch day), as reprints can take over a month and the publisher’s original plan was to print as many copies as they do for a typical philosophy book (ie. very few, and possibly even fewer than typical due to industry-wide supply chain issues). Overall, these purchases constituted a minority of sales.
Would it be correct to say that university groups that were quite strongly and repeatedly encouraged to bulk-buy the book by central EA orgs (which MacAskill either works for, is a director of, or serves on the board of)?
I must say that I am also not convinced by the argument that the only or best way of preventing supply-chain issues is having a book bulk-ordered by affiliated organisations, but this is a weaker-held perspective.
It seems to me there could be other explanations for bulk orders (giveaways?). I don’t know what we have reason to believe.
I don’t believe anything nefarious happened, but other people might believe that. If the bulk orders are for giveaways and such, the book might simply be a bit less popular than the bestseller status would otherwise suggest :)
Your previous comment gives a different impression of your beliefs, fwiw.
Jumping in here — Will is doing a couple events which involved large purchases for attendees, and several university groups also made large orders for Fall 2022 reading groups back in the early summer, when we were driving early sales to ensure the publisher would do a large enough first print of the book. This played an important role in the book not selling out or running low on copies early on (as Superintelligence did, which caused shipping delays on launch day), as reprints can take over a month and the publisher’s original plan was to print as many copies as they do for a typical philosophy book (ie. very few, and possibly even fewer than typical due to industry-wide supply chain issues). Overall, these purchases constituted a minority of sales.
By minority do you mean anything less than 50%, or something significantly smaller like 10% or 1%? Your comment seems consistent with either.
Would it be correct to say that university groups that were quite strongly and repeatedly encouraged to bulk-buy the book by central EA orgs (which MacAskill either works for, is a director of, or serves on the board of)?
I must say that I am also not convinced by the argument that the only or best way of preventing supply-chain issues is having a book bulk-ordered by affiliated organisations, but this is a weaker-held perspective.