Top 10 Most Read Books In The World

Illustration: Jared Fanning

I had an inclination that The Bible would be number one, but I had no idea by how much. I think it is a little skewed because of the chosen statistics. For one, it is over the last 50 years - which is a long span of time. The first Harry Potter book wasn't published until 1997. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003. I will not bother to look up Twilight. Ew, Twilight. Also this is based on books sold, I am sure The Bible does a whole lot of selling to churches and what not.

I would love to see this with just the last 10-12 years. I am not sure what other metric could be used besides sales but it would be worth looking into.

-Via Bits and Pieces

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that will be only about 4.8 million hotel and motel rooms as per the American Hotel & Lodging Association, and not all rooms have bibles, and how about counting the ones taken from the rooms?

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The chart specifically says 'over the last 50 years', so I stand by every point I've made.

If you think that LOTR established the pattern for long stories over multiple volumes, you may not have heard of Homer, who pre-dates Tolkien (and much of the Bible) by a significant margin.

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Except that in the case of the Bible, they actually WERE separate books (well, scrolls and codices) originally. They were assembled before any 'common standard' even existed. As for HP vs LOTR - Return of the King was not in its final form when Fellowship was published. LOTR actually established the pattern followed by other book series comprising a defined story told across multiple volumes.

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While you could certainly say it about LOTR, the Harry Potter novels were never 'divided for the purposes of sales', they were written and published separately over a long period of time: 1997 to 2007. You seem to infer that the Bible is also a collection of books, but some of those 'books' contain only a handful of pages and some don't even break 1000 words. By any common standard they are no more than 'chapters' or 'sections' rather than standalone volumes. You could divide the thing into two (Old/New Testaments) but any other sub-division makes little sense. If you find a publisher which sells copies of each of the 66 'books' in the Bible separately, you'll also find a publisher with plenty of copies of 'Philemon', 'Obadiah' and 'Nahum' left unsold.