Sign o' the Times: New York Times to Begin Tracking E-Book Bestsellers
The New York Times has announced that it will begin publishing bestseller lists for fiction and non-fiction e-books early next year.
The move into the e-realm reflects the growing sales and impact of digital copies of books sold online, spurred largely in part by the release of Apple's iPad in April and the continued success of dedicated e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle .
Forrester Research Inc has predicted that e-book sales will reach $1 billion this year ; other figures pointing to skyrocketing sales come from the Association of American Publishers, which pegs e-book sales as tripling to $304.6 million through the first nine months of this year from $105.6 million during the same period last year.
A summary of the new e-book bestseller lists at the Times said that the newspaper spent two years coming up with a system to track and verify the sales of e-books. The Times has maintained a highly regarded bestseller list for print books since 1935.
One e-book that will surely not make the list is the now-banned "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct." Amazon dropped the provocative, self-published title from its Kindle bookstore last night after an eruption of public outrage.
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