publishing data

This data pro­vided one piece of a com­plex puz­zle. The rest of the puz­zle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I re­ceived an email from an au­thor with ad­vanced cod­ing skills who had cre­ated a soft­ware pro­gram that can crawl on­line best­seller lists and grab moun­tains of data. All of this data is pub­lic—it’s on­line for any­one to see—but until now it’s been ex­tremely dif­fi­cult to gather, ag­gre­gate, and or­ga­nize....