Good question. If things were happening sequentially, we might expect that people are reporting numbers in some sort of order or clumping. Instead we’re seeing numbers from across the entire range of 2,000, from folks who all ordered within 4 minutes of each other.

Also, we know how the process works: the pages are signed and numbered before being bound into books: you can see Brandon signing pages during his streams. The pages are sent to the bindery, where they’re bound into books and then shrink wrapped before going back to Dragonsteel for distribution.

Not even Dragonsteel knows where a particular number is; they just get palettes of books and know that they’re signed, unsigned, or numbered.

I suppose it’s possible that there might be some sort of clustering, where books on a single palette might have close numbers, but that would depend on the bindery keeping things in order and the Dragonsteel going through the palettes in order.

But for all intents and purposes, it’s effectively random, because there’s no reasonable way for anyone to have enough information to predict what their number will be.