TOP 10 MOST READ BOOKS

By Nigel Tomes

The graph above shows the “Top 10 Most Read Books in the World” over the last 50 years. We don’t know precisely how many books were actually read, so it’s based on book sales (not merely printed).

Bible #1 Best-Seller

The best-seller is not Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or The Twilight Saga; it’s the Bible. The graph’s most striking feature is that Bible outsold the ‘rest of the pack’ by a huge margin. 3,900 million copies of the Bible were purchased between 1960 and 2010. The #2 best-seller was Chairman Mao’s Quotes. It was a best-seller during China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. However, it bombed after Mao’s death. Mao’s “Little Red Book,” now consigned to the trash can of failed ideas, is fast-sinking into oblivion. The Bible (which Mao sought to eradicate) outsold Mao’s Thoughts by a factor of five!

Recent block-buster novels like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and The Twilight Saga appear in the “Top 10” list; so do the older “classics”—Gone with the Wind and the (non-fiction)Diary of Anne Frank. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and the financial advisor, Think and Grow Rich, also made the list. We suspect, over the long haul, most of these other works will have a “short shelf-life,” as new novels emerge. By comparison the Bible has shown remarkable staying power over the long haul—2,000 years and counting. Added together the other 9 books only sold 40% of the number of Bibles purchased during this era. To date the Scriptures remain unchallenged as the “Best Seller of all Times.”