WSJ adds e-books to bestseller lists, joining the New York Times

With rising sales of Kindles and iPads, the Wall Street Journal has announced an obvious but important move: e-books will now be included on the paper's bestseller lists.

The Journal and Nielsen Bookscan, which provides sales figures, will publish four new lists in the paper: e-book bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction books, and combined e-book and physical book sales in fiction and nonfiction. Nielsen said it will cull e-book sales data from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and Google, among others. Until now, Nielsen had not included e-books in its Bookscan reports.

The move puts the Journal's bestseller lists on par with those published by the USA Today and New York Times, which include e-books. (The Times began including e-books earlier this year; the USA Today has been doing so since 2009.)

But as the AP's Hillel Italie noted, the new lists will not disclose the number of copies sold--just their relative rankings.

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