Book Review Gets With the Times, Kindles Interest in E-Book Sales

ArtsBeat announced today that this week's New York Times Book Review will feature, for the first time, bestseller lists accounting for the sales of e-books. The lists, all of which appear on the Times site, include a list of combined e-book and print sales, a list of just e-book sales, and a list of all print sales in paperback and hardcover combined, which will be web-only. (All links go to the fiction lists.)

Thankfully, "Inside the List" and its companion columns remain intact—though this week's "Inside the List" remarks only once on the fact that e-books have joined the party. As do paperback lists—there's no such thing as a reduced-price paperback e-book, at least not along such distinct lines. How revolutionary is this change? All three lists are topped by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Tick Tock on the fiction side and Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken on the e-book side, but Stieg Larsson's enduring popularity as an e-book author pushes all three of his novels into the top 4 of the combined print and e-book list, where they don't reside on the hardcover-only list. That seems more a result, though, of the fact that a Stieg Larsson e-book will never become a paperback—we may as well settle in for his longer-than-expected run at the new bestseller list.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_