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:
“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Shea—they call him Scholar Jack—
Went down the list of the dead.
Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,
The crews of the gig and yawl,
The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
Carpenters, coal-passers—all.”
—Joseph I. C. Clarke (1846–1925)
“An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)