First point-of-sale records system

It’s been said, and with some justification, that the most widely published fiction is most publishers’ sales figures. Fiction was transformed into fact, however, with the setting-up of the world’s first point-of-sale records system for books. Launched in January 2001, Nielsen BookScan records point-of-sale data from 33,500 bookshops around the world to produce the most accurate record of worldwide book sales so far produced.