BookScan Bestseller Lists Come to Wall Street Journal

Publishers Weekly reports this morning that the Wall Street Journal has come to an agreement with BookScan -- the Nielsen service that reports on retail sales of books in the USA -- to replace WSJ's old, self-created bestseller lists with new lists based on BookScan sales from the previous week.

The new lists will be available in the traditional WSJ flavors of fiction, nonfiction, and business, but will also include "genres such as travel and cooking, or topical interests such as presidential memoirs."

The lists were to appear first in the print WSJ and on WSJ.com today; I haven't been able to find them on the site.

Many civilians have expressed interest in seeing "real" BookScan numbers; this isn't quite that, but they will be able to see rankings based on actual reported numbers for the first time.