This page provides lists of best-selling single-volume books and book series to date and in any language. "Best-selling" refers to the estimated number of copies sold of each book, rather than the number of books printed or currently owned. Comics and textbooks are not included in this list. The books are listed according to the highest sales estimate as reported in reliable, independent sources. This list is incomplete, since there are many books such as Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the individual Harry Potter books which are commonly cited as "best-selling books" yet have no reliable sales figures. There is a separate section on this page for books known to have sold over 10 million copies, yet do not have figures for their final sales data.
The Bible, the Qur'an and Quotations from Chairman Mao, are widely reported as the most-printed and most-distributed books in the world, with many hundreds of millions of copies believed to be in existence in some cases. Exact print figures for some such books may also be missing or unreliable since these kinds of books may be produced by many different and unrelated publishers, in some cases over many centuries. All such books have been excluded from this List of best-selling books for these reasons.
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list and/or books:
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“Lastly, his tomb
Shall list and founder in the troughs of grass
And none shall speak his name.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.”
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)