Amazon adds category bestseller rankings to book detail pages

Amazon has begun displaying the category bestseller rankings on book detail pages, at the bottom of the Product Details section. Here's how it looks for Freakonomics:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #49 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories:

#1 in	Books > Business & Investing > Economics > Econometrics
#1 in	Books > Entertainment > Pop Culture > Popular Culture
#2 in	Books > Business & Investing > Popular Economics

Apparently there's a maximum of three categories Amazon will show here, and if a book doesn't rank in the top 100 in any category, this feature isn't displayed.

Amazon has been streamlining book detail pages recently, so it's odd that a marginally useful feature like this would become a priority. It would be more useful if Amazon took more care in classifying books. Some books aren't assigned to all their relevant categories and subcategories, and some appear in inappropriate categories. In my recent experience, Amazon ignores suggestions from publishers on this issue.

Another problem: The rankings are sometimes for many books in the category lists are incorrect. For example, it's not unusual for a book with an Amazon Sales Rank worse than 100,000 to become "stuck" near the top of some categories, while the surrounding books have far superior sales rankings.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors