BookScan

Following the success of Nielsen SoundScan which tracked point of sale figures for music, the Nielsen Company decided to launch a similar service for book sales which had been established and was owned by UK based Whitaker & Sons Ltd. Nielsen BookScan was launched in January 2001. In the rest of the world the BookScan service is owned by NIQ. NIQ was formed from the divestiture of consumer intelligence business of the Nielsen Holdings (known as NielsenIQ) to private equity firm Advent International in March 2021. Since October 2022, the American Booksellers Association has been BookScan’s official aggregator for independent bookstore data. In March 2023, following the merger of The NPD Group and IRI to form a new company called Circana, NPD BookScan was rebranded as Circana BookScan. ==Methodology==

BookScan relies on point of sale data from a number of major book sellers. In 2009, BookScan's US Consumer Market Panel covered 75% of retail sales. ==Use of BookScan==

BookScan was initially greeted with scepticism, but is now widely used by both the publishing industry and the media. The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal carried bestseller lists from BookScan data (non-fiction and fiction lists broken into traditional book, ebook, and combined lists) until the fall of 2023. NIQ offers the BookScan service in 10 territories outside the U.S.: the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Brazil and Mexico, with Poland next to launch. ==References==