There are over 150 Books of Lists produced by business journals, and hundreds more industry lists and rankings produced by other publishers across the United States. From New York to LA, from Florida to Charlotte, this site is your portal to finding more ranked lists than any other resource in the world.


Electronic Book of Lists

The business journal Book of Lists was introduced as a print product. In recent years, the Book of Lists has taken on new electronic formats, as it has become a staple for sales professionals looking to bring raw data into their CRM systems. Some of the more popular electronic book of lists formats are listed below:

1. CD-ROM Book of Lists. The Book of Lists on CD-ROM is something you can usually purchase online and have mailed to you by the business journal. The disk usually contains the raw data, structured within some sort of searchable database system (usually a homegrown, custom interface).This can be effective or clumsy, depending on how much money and effort the publisher has invested in the CD-ROM data interface. But nearly all of these will have an option for exporting the data in Excel format, which is a highly versatile format.

2. PDF Book of Lists. Some publishers, like Westfair Inc's Hudson Valley Business Journal, produce a book of lists in PDF format that can be purchased and downloaded online. This product is great as a lead list, but runs up against the natural limitations of the PDF format when it comes to extracting the data into another format (such as Excel Book of Lists). It is nearly impossible, or at least extremely time consuming, to try and get the data out of a PDF and into a more versatile format for importing into your CRM.

3. Excel Book of Lists. The Book of Lists in Excel format is about as versatile and liquid as it gets. This format enables users to manipulate and resort data in almost limitless ways. The Excel master will obviously take a greater level of joy from data in this format, but Excel is accessible enough that even the novice can garner great value from data in this format. Excel lends itself very well to import into a CRM system. I would include the CSV book of lists, as well as the text tab delimited book of lists in this category, as they are effectively other names for the same thing. Any Excel file can be saved as a CSV or text tab delimited file. The .XLS Book of Lists also lends itself, very much, to creating mail merges and, if the data is there, email merges as well. You can get a lot of mileage out of the Excel format for Book of Lists.

4. E-book Book of Lists. The Book of Lists in E-book format is, again, great as a lead list. You can usually interact and find specific lists by turning e-pages to isolate the lists you want to see. Sometimes these products offer click-able hotlinks, which is also convenient. However, I have never seen an e-book that would enable the reader to download the raw data in Excel; so for CRM import, this format doesn't help.

5. Book of Lists Database. An online Book of Lists searchable database is excellent for narrowing down leads, especially if it is searchable and sortable by multiple criteria. Sometimes these databases will allow you to purchase downloads of raw data in addition to being able to enjoy the rich searching interface. Again, the user friendliness will vary depending on the investment of the publisher into its software.

If you are aware of any other formats, feel free to contact us so we can publish them in this report.