The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it will be adding an electronic books best-seller list in the fiction and non-fiction categories beginning in early 2011. Times Will Rank E-book Best Sellers.

The e-books best-seller ranking will be based on data derived from online retailers, chain and independent bookstores and book publishers.

The Times reports that its decision to provide the electronic book listing is due to the growing popularity of digital books, designed to be read by an electronic book reader or electronic books device. Electronic books are expected by some experts to rise to 25 percent of all book publisher sales over the next two to three years. “E-book sales have risen steeply in 2010, spurred by the growing popularity of the Amazon Kindle and by the release of the Apple iPad in April,” the Times states in referring to two of the more popular electronic reader devices.

The Times cites figures from the Association of American Publishers, which reported that sales of online books or digital books in the first nine months of 2010 were $304.6 million, a nearly 190 percent increase from $105.6 million in digital ebook sales from the same period in 2009.

The Times will redesign the best-seller list section of its Sunday Book Review to reflect the electronic books best-seller lists. Currently, the publication ranks books in fourteen categories, including in the areas of fiction, nonfiction, advice books, children’s books and graphic books.