No, romance and erotica won't dominate the list, except to the extent romance alrady dominates it. Stephen King and James Patterson and Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts and all the usual suspects will be at the top. Digital-first authors of romance and erotica are unlikely to be named.
I wasn't clear before. I didn't mean to say the e-list and the paper-list would match, line for line, but that they'd contain essentially the same books, perhaps at slightly different times, slightly different rankings, with maybe a surprise or two, but nothing distinctly different. Oh, plus you'd have the true self-publishers like the guy -- forget his name -- who's already a non-fiction bestseller and has decided to release his future non-fiction himself, electronically, instead of through a traditional publisher.
As long as ebook versions of paper books are released at a DIFFERENT time than the paper books, then, yes, there will be technically different lists, much as there are often different lists for hardcover and paperback. But the books on the lists will be essentially the same.
I'm not sure what evidence there is to the contrary. I just looked at the topsellers for Kindle, and they're the Bush memoir, a Grisham, the Steig Larsson books, and a Nora Roberts. On the paper books bestseller list at Amazon, you've got the Bush memoir, a Grisham, a Steig Larsson, and a Stephen King. Slightly different, because I believe the Nora Roberts book was a paperback, and these are all hardcover, some of which aren't available in electronic format yet, but fundamentally the same.
And I'm not seeing how this will make any room on the list for small, digital-first publishers. To make the traditional bestseller lists, it's generally said (if I remember correctly) that the author likely sold at least somewhere between 50K and 100K copies IN ONE WEEK. Let's say 5% of readers are now getting their books electronically, so these big authors will sell between 2500 and 5K e-books IN ONE WEEK. The top numbers for digital-first publishers runs around a thousand copies. In a MONTH (although most of those sales are in the month of the release).
The people who read ebooks aren't IN ADDITION TO readers in general; they're a subset of readers in general, and they read essentially the same books as paper readers, plus some digital-first books (and the percentage who read digital-first is minuscule). The patterns should therefore be essentially the same, with the only unknown being the folks who have a bestseller-size following and switch to self-publishing electronically.
Keep in mind that these lists are not about the total number of books sold over the life of the book (where digital-first might give the paper bestsellers a run for their money occasionally), but the total number sold in ONE WEEK.
So, bottom line, I think all this separate list does is try to demonstrate that the NYT has a clue about the ebook industry, when it doesn't. Of course, no one has a clue about it right now, but listing the topsellers is unlikely to provide any good marketing opportunities for digital-first publishers. I'm not sure it'll even provide any interesting data.
A number of books from digital first publishers have made the NYT Best Sellers List including the combined list.
