AI predicts bestsellers: Software is changing the book market

German publishers will soon have software available that can predict the sales success of a book with a hit rate of up to 99 percent. This could fundamentally change the journalistic landscape.

Before we talk about the end of the world, a few words about the Baden statistics company Media Control. This company has been tracking which book is sold in which store and how often for many decades and then makes the data available to its customers, primarily publishers and bookstores. Based on this data, publishers can, for example, calculate what advance payment would be advisable for an author’s next book according to all the rules of commercial common sense. Booksellers can estimate how many copies of a particular book they should have in stock at a given time.