The New York Times will begin reporting the best selling e-books in new fiction and non-fiction lists early next year, the newspaper reports.

The Times has published best-seller lists since 1935 and they have been a significant driver of book sales for decades. Bricks-and-mortar stores post the list and, space permitting, section off these titles outside the fiction and non-fictions aisles as close to the cash registers as is humanly possible. The same has become true with advent of e-book stores, where lists and search are key entry points, and browsing is somewhat more problematic. So expect these lists to be a boon to e-book merchants on day one.

But e-books are still bought by only a relatively small number of readers – a recent Forrester survey found that only seven percent of U.S. adults read books digitally. The same poll also found, however, that once people have a taste they adopt quickly: respondents who already have an e-reader said they expected half of all the books they buy in the coming year to be digital.

So a dedicated e-book list seems a natural extension, and the Times said it had been working for two years "creating a system that tracks and verifies e-book sales." Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla in the e-book space, has long ranked its own Kindle e-book sales. The Times doesn't specify but it seems logical to assume that Amazon's rankings will significantly inform the Times' lists. The newspaper says only that their lists will be "compiled from weekly data from publishers, chain bookstores, independent booksellers and online retailers, among other sources."

It isn't clear if the Times will include digital sales data in its main fiction and non-fiction lists, but it should. It will be a while before e-book sales information in isolation is very meaningful. Many new books aren't even released as e-books immediately, notablythe wildly successful saga of the 2008 presidential election, Game Change. So for a while we will see something on a hardcover list and not on the equivalent e-book list.

The power of the *Times *putting a big spotlight on this non-digital parity might have the (unintended?) effect of increasing pressure on publishers not to delay digital editions of at least those new releases they are positioning to be print New York Times bestsellers.

It could also make it more difficult for publishers to perpetuate the "agency" approach to e-book sales, which forces ebook sellers to sell at dictated prices even if they are prepared to absorb the difference, and decimate their own margins, to bring the retail price down. New e-book titles do tend to be priced at far below the typical $20+ cover price of new hardcovers but not as low as many consumers – and Amazon, which tried in vain to sell them for $10 – believe they should fetch since they do not incur the significant printing, storage or delivery costs of their print cousins.

E-Books to Join The New York Times Best-Seller List - NYTimes.com

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