A photo from Jacket Copy showing the Amazon bestseller list as of yesterday -- still topped by freebies

A Publishers Weekly report says that Amazon.com has announced that its bestseller list will now consist of books that have actually been, well, sold. That is, it will no longer contain books it has been giving away free — which, last week, constituted all of the books on its top ten list, as Carolyn Kellogg notes in this report for the Los Angeles Times‘ Jacket Copy blog:

The plethora of free books on the Kindle bestseller list has been known for some time. In December, Galleycat found 64 of the top 100 Kindle ebooks were free. In January, the New York Times reported on the tendency to climb the bestseller list. All of us were a bit perplexed about the use of “bestseller” to designate book that are not, well, sold. Grammarians, at the very least, will welcome the change.

So, too, will major publishers. Amazon is doing the right thing, an executive at HarperCollins told Publishers Weekly, which reports “consumers ‘want to know what books everyone is reading, and buying,’ and that a list which combines free downloads and books for sale doesn’t deliver this information.”

But as Kellogg notes, there is a downside: “But one constituency that may be hurt by the change are the independent publishers that were scoring so many downloads. Many had used short-term free downloads of one book to help direct readers to a newer title by the same author.”