It used to be that people who didn't work in the creative professions - civilians -- really knew about the success or failure of works of art and entertainment only in terms of their critical reception. But during the last decade or two, we've all become inescapably, acutely aware of the dollars and cents of the culture industry. We're told again and again how particular films and TV shows and are selling. And the sales of every new record is tracked and published widely -- in real time.

With literature, the sales numbers have remained behind a confidential scrim. We hear about a few best-selling novels, and how this or that blockbuster sold 2 million copies. But precise numbers have been impossible to come by.

The quaint, genteel book publishing business has liked it this way. For one thing, because it's not nice to talk about money, and because the shadowy old-fashioned system has disguised the fact that so many big-name books -- important books, great books -- sell so pitiably few copies.

That is about to change. Bookscan, a new service, is now tallying up sales every day, at thousands of cash registers across the country. Real, hard numbers of books being sold.

The information is not yet widely disseminated - not yet. But on Bookscan's most recent list of bestselling new novels, you have to go down to number 14 to find a bona fide work of literature -- Richard Russo's Empire Falls. At the stores in Bookscan's sample, which right now represents only about 20 percent of all sales, the novel sold exactly 1,512 copies.

Philip Roth's new novel, The Dying Animal, has sold maybe 21,000 copies in all, nationwide, since it was published a month ago. And Paul Theroux's new novel, Hotel Honolulu, after two months or so, has sold about 14,000 copies. These are among our living literary masters. And yet all of their hardcover readers could fit in a minor-league baseball stadium.

I'm all for transparency and truth, even when the truth hurts a little. My worry is that all this new information, broadcast like sports results, will further confuse the definition of literary excellence. Elsewhere in the culture during the last 20 years, as we've come to know more and more detail about box office and Nielsen ratings, quality and commercial success have become mixed up -- and practically synonymous as ideas. The big seller is practically good by definition, and the show that only a few people saw is marginal, pathetic, unimportant.

Books have been somewhat exempt from this phenomenon. But that exemption, I'm afraid, may be about to end. Welcome to the 21st century.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.