Amazon UK Ranks Updating Every Hour

It's official (well, not in the normal sense of the word, just official with me:-), Amazon UK ranks are updating every hour. Does this mean they've adopted the American Amazon platform across the boards? I'll haven't checked, Japan, Germany, France or Canada yet, I don't get enough sales through those stores to make it interesting. I have noticed that reviews from Canada are flowing through to the US now, they don't go in the other direction, and haven't in years.

I never tried to graph sales ranks for Amazon UK because I didn't have enough data points and the movements were too slow, but maybe now I'll try to create some equivalency. I may have a problem with generating a checksum, though, because it seems to me that Amazon reports their international sales in one clump rather than breaking them out by country. It could be that the information is buried in a press release somewhere and never made it into an annual report.

If you've never checked your books sales ranks and category ranks on the international Amazon sites, it's quite easy, and you don't need to speak the language. Just go to one of your books that you have bookmarked on Amazon in the US and put the cursor in the address bar at the top of the browser window, where you type www.somesite.com when you want to go somewhere directly. Then, highlight the "com" part and type the following letters for the each country you want to visit:

Canada - ca
France - fr
Germany - de
Japan - co.jp
UK - co.uk

Japan is probably the toughest to interpret for non-Japanese speakers (everybody reading this blog) but the rank appears right under the publisher info like on every other Amazon site - just ignore all the other characters.