More Bestseller List Shenanagans

Publishers Weekly reports this week on the case of Dave Zinczenko's Eat This, Not That, which is selling very strongly...but does not appear on the New York Times bestseller list. (It is on PW's list.)

The Times sniffed that Eat This "falls under the classification of of a calorie counter book, which the Times does not track."

Anybody else get the sense that the Times is just making it up as they go along? Has the Times ever explicitly deigned to say what categories they are willing to "track" and which they won't?

A bestseller list that ignores the books that actually sell the best is not just a bad idea -- it's a failure and a lie. The Times just keeps digging themselves deeper and deeper into their hole, as they gerrymander these books out of that list and dismissively decide not to track entire categories of books because they don't like them. Why do we still pay attention to these people?