Publishers Weekly Best Books Books

Publishers Weekly is the book trade's weekly journal, read by publishers, booksellers, and librarians rather than by general readers. Its editors publish a Best Books list every fall, and the children's side of it is divided into three categories — picture books, middle grade, and young adult — each running to roughly twenty titles, alongside an overall Top 10 that spans all ages. The archive of past lists reaches back to 2009.

The brevity is the point. Where the library lists aim for coverage and run to a hundred titles or more, twenty picture books is a narrow read on what the trade itself thought mattered that year, which makes the list quick to work through and easy to set against a longer one. A book that turns up both here and on School Library Journal's list or the New York Public Library's has cleared two rooms with different incentives.

Information from Publishers Weekly.