Male Authors Top Waterstone's Best Selling List

According to a UPI story, Waterstone's, the big book store chain in Britain, found that in it's top 100 best selling books written since 1982 (the founding of the first of the stores), male writers appear more often than female. Unfortunately, the story doesn't bother to say what percentage of the list is men, so I did a bit more checking ... and found that this is much more complicated than it should be.

Here's what London's Daily Telegraph has to say:

The company asked its 5,000 employees to name their favourite five books written since 1982, when Waterstone's opened its first store. The resulting list of the top 100 favourites is dominated by male authors.

That's hardly best selling - just the off-hand favorites of 5,000 people, who, I would think, are not truly representative of the clientele. Now the foolishness really starts. Here's the lead sentence in the Telegraph's story:

Controversial though it may sound, men write better books than women, at least according to the staff of Britain's biggest book chain, Waterstone's.

Huh? Favorite means the best? How about ... favorite? And then apparently some spokesperson for the chain gave his theory of how this came about - that men prefer books by men but that women are not influenced by the sex of the author.

This entire exercise shows that a) journalists should get some understanding of numbers and what a study can and cannot show, and b) journalists should also learn some basic logic and understand whether one statement of a necessity follows another. For what it's worth, or not, here's the Waterstone's list.