Publishers Weekly reports that the New York Times is making a significant change to how it lists bestsellers in the middle-grade and young-adult book categories, creating separate paperback and e-book lists to be published on-line while only the hardcover lists show up in print.

Publishers Lunch reports (behind a paywall) that this has the effect of removing nine of the top ten young adult bestsellers, including three by John Green, from the print list, and moving the previous week’s number 9 title on the list up to the number 1 position. By the same token, nine of the ten titles on the middle-grade list disappear as well.

A New York Times representative claimed that the changes were meant to help discoverability of books. In a way, it could—three lists means up to three times as many titles on them. (And potentially three times as much advertising from publishers with books featured in the lists.) On the other hand, given that two of the three lists will be on-line only, and only the hardcover list will be appearing in print, it effectively displaces 9/10 of the titles on the only list to hit paper. Indeed, the fact that 9/10 of the best-selling titles on both lists were not hardcovers suggests that the Times might have chosen the wrong format list to print.

Or maybe they had something against having so many paperback titles in their list? There’s some precedent for this, after all. The whole reason the Times originally started a separate children’s-book bestseller list to begin with, in 2000, was to get those darned Harry Potter titles out of the “general” bestseller list meant to showcase books for adults.

Regardless, the New York Times has spoken, and only hardcover books will count for the print edition of its children’s book lists from now on.

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