Best Selling Books of all time.

[What Exit?]

The English dominate this.

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens English 1859 over 200 million[1]
The Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkien English 1954–1955 150 million[2]
The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien English 1937 over 100 million[3]
红楼梦 (Dream of the Red Chamber) Cao Xueqin Chinese 1759-1791 over 100 million [4]
And Then There Were None Agatha Christie English 1939 100 million[5]

Data from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books

I always figured LotR and The Hobbit were up very high but I never realized they were this high.

Please note this list does not include the Bible, Koran or similar text.

[Zuul]

Yeah, those are much higher than I expected. I'm not sure what I was thinking would be at the top of the list instead, though. Of those five, I've read all of them except for Dream of the Red Chamber. I used to love reading mysteries, but it's been a long time since I touched one.

I'm a little surprised to see The Da Vinci Code so high. I knew it was popular, but outselling Harry Potter and all of those classics?

[The Original An Gadaí]

What about the Little Red Book? It used to be up there in those lists.

I would never have imagined A Tale Of Two Cities would be in the running. I suppose it is still used as a set text in schools.

[What Exit?]

Yeah, those are much higher than I expected. I'm not sure what I was thinking would be at the top of the list instead, though. Of those five, I've read all of them except for Dream of the Red Chamber. I used to love reading mysteries, but it's been a long time since I touched one.

I'm a little surprised to see The Da Vinci Code so high. I knew it was popular, but outselling Harry Potter and all of those classics?

It is a little sad to me The Da Vinci Code was so high. I'm not sure why, at least it beats some Sidney Sheldon mindless trash.

What about the Little Red Book? It used to be up there in those lists.

I would never have imagined A Tale Of Two Cities would be in the running. I suppose it is still used as a set text in schools.

I would be even happier about the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings being so high if not for Tale of Two Cities proving that prolonged use in schools contributes a lot to the numbers.

[The Original An Gadaí]

She has sold 83 million copies and I've never heard of it before!

[Peeta Mellark]

Religious books, especially the Bible and the Qur’an, are probably the most-printed books, but it is nearly impossible to find reliable figures about them. Many copies of the Bible and the Qur'an are printed and given away free, instead of being sold. The same goes for some political books, like the works of Mao Zedong or Adolf Hitler. All such books have been excluded from this list for those reasons.

I think removing sales by university bookstores and other cases where the intent is clearly for use in the classroom would have been fair as well. Like What Exit? says, it does throw things off. I doubt there are very many people buying A Tale of Two Cities for pure pleasure these days. No offense to Charles Dickens, but having that stuff crammed down your throat in school as part of the literary canon is far different from being an enduring classic because of genuine love.

Seeing as how it's on pretty much every "great books" literary canon list, is relatively easy to read, is long enough for a class without being so long as to overwhelm students (most paperback versions are around 400 pages) and isn't very controversial this long after the French Revolution its popularity is grossly inflated by the fact that it's an easy "important book" to toss at students.

[parzival]

It's sort of surprising how many recent books are fairly high in the rankings. In the past decade or two there's been the rise of new forms of media, and the apparent splitting of a few massive sources of news and information into the wide and disparate array that we have now. I expected that we wouldn't see much in the way of massive cultural phenomena, especially not in books.
Instead, it seems the opposite has occurred - down the list there are books like The Secret,Angels and Demons,Diary of a Wimpy Kid,the Millennium trilogy,and The Shack. Some of those are not terrible books, but they haven't been around so long and they're already ahead of a number of more worthwhile classics.
I wonder how this list will progress over time. Looks like the oldest one on there after The Dream of the Red Chamber and The Divine Comedy is War and Peace[1869], at "36 million in the USSR", so it could be in a higher bracket.

[Sarahfeena]

It is interesting that people are apparently buying the best-sellers en masse, especially considering that bookstores are going out of business. Perhaps because the Amazon business model is making it so cheap and convenient to buy books, vs. getting them from library or passing them around among friends.

[Sarahfeena]

Or, thinking about it, is it just a function of people buying more little items for themselves now than they used to? For instance, my parents never would have bought a best-seller. Keepsake books like art books, history, things like that, yes. But a novel to read once? No way, that's what the library was for. I think people are much more likely to just plunk down $15 for something like that these days than they used to be.

[What Exit?]

Sarah, I started buying books at a youngish age, probably by age 11 or 12. My parents bought books and traded them around. We also made heavy use of used book stores and book swaps. But I bought plenty of new books. Not usually best sellers as that was not by typical reading area but hundreds if not a thousand books I bought new of all sorts. In fact last year I finally got about 600-800 books out of the house and donated them to a really good charity that raises money by selling used books. This was only about a third of my fiction.

This is in addition to ripping through school and county libraries along the way.

[Sarahfeena]

Well, I'm not saying we never bought a book, we always got them for Christmas gifts, and if there was a special one we might buy a copy. But I think there was a sense of frugalness about buying...stuff...than there is now, not just books. Maybe I'm off base on this as it relates to books, though.

[Rube E. Tewesday]

The figures for Diary of a Wimpy kid are pretty amazing, given how few years it is since the first one even came out.

My kid, though, says it's the one book that even the non-readers love. That's really gonna extend its sales.

[What Exit?]

I recall a lot of households having hundreds of books and some sort of usually cheap encyclopedias. Paperback in particular were fairly cheap. My own collection is a little crazy in size, though many many dopers seem to share in my book accumulating.

As we're effectively the same age and I know my family was lower middle class with little room for real luxuries outside of 1 color TV set, I am surprised you thought book buying as out of the ordinary. I wonder if you lived in walking distance to a library? That could make a huge difference. I had maybe 50 Hardy Boy books before 6th grade, I think most were presents. So in that regard book buying was common.

[Sarahfeena]

No, I didn't live within walking distance, but we did visit the library weekly. We had one wall of bookshelves in our den, and we all had books in our rooms. And, yeah, we did have a Junior World Book Encyclopedia set! I'd forgotten about those. Our family books ran to educational stuff, though, as I said. I'm talking more about like books you'll read once and get rid of...like whatever the equivalent to John Grisham was in those days. Something you'd want to read, but was just for fun and you'd never read again. My mom used to pick up stuff like that as you said at second-hand bookstores, and then pass along to a friend. But going out and buying it in hardcover, no. She would probably not have bought it even in a trade paperback if they had them in those days. And yes, I had tons of Nancy Drews and stuff like that, so maybe our experience was about the same, but we're taking across each other.

[What Exit?]

OK, strictly Hard Covered NY Times best sellers? Those were rare indeed but I think they are still fairly rare. The kids books are exceptions and the Harry Potter books are a huge sellers that defy the trend. I don't think most of those Da Vinci Codes were sold as Hard Covers but as paperbacks. A huge hard covered first run sale is over a million. The HPs were so far over that, that little compares to it. I remember the Silmarillion sold maybe 7 million in Hard Cover and that is the only thing I can think of that compares.

[Sarahfeena]

Well, maybe the economics of books has changed. Cause now I think hardcovers are still rare, but there are the trade paperbacks which cost around $12-15 and seem to be purchased by the ton. There was no such option in those days, and paperbacks were pretty cheap. I still say that people have got to be spending more on impulsive book purchasing than they used to.

[Marsilia]

We get a lot of people in the store that have newspaper or magazine cutouts that they have to pull out in order to even remember the name of the book they're looking for. We also have people who buy books based entirely on word of mouth. We also have people come in and just ask "What's good?" so it really doesn't surprise me that more recent books are on the list.

Also, it seems that book-to-movie adaptations are becoming bigger and bigger sales drivers for the books in question.

[What Exit?]

Well, maybe the economics of books has changed. Cause now I think hardcovers are still rare, but there are the trade paperbacks which cost around $12-15 and seem to be purchased by the ton. There was no such option in those days, and paperbacks were pretty cheap. I still say that people have got to be spending more on impulsive book purchasing than they used to.

Could be, The giant B&N and Border bookstores, Amazon, WalMart and the like make it a lot easier to buy these books. When we were young, the bookstores were pretty small overall. I remember being in Manhattan when I was 13 or so and being completely overwhelmed by the multi-storied B. Daltons and Barnes and Nobles. These were incredible places too me. The one bookstore in biking distance to me was smallish. Special orders had to go through B. Daltons at the Mall. Now every book in print is easily available online and most popular new books are easily available at the big box stores.

[The Original An Gadaí]

It is interesting that people are apparently buying the best-sellers en masse, especially considering that bookstores are going out of business. Perhaps because the Amazon business model is making it so cheap and convenient to buy books, vs. getting them from library or passing them around among friends.

I dunno what it's like in Chicagoland but here most petrol stations, most supermarkets, newsagents, museum shops, touristy shops and any other number of stores carry bestsellers. Even if dedicated bookstores die out there are tonnes of outlets that sell books.

[The Original An Gadaí]

As Sarah notes the trade paperback sector which tends to retail here at €13.99 (roughly US$18) is a huge market. I don't know if it's just my store or not but the majority of these that sell well seem to be for women and by women.