The most sold book in the world

Excluding the Bible, Business Insider did a great chart on this as of 2012… that’s unfortunately not quite right, but we’ll get to that in a moment:

First, Harry Potter sold 450 million copies as a series, not as a single book. Likewise, Twilight is a series, and so there’s a lot of mixing of apples and oranges in this chart.

Then there’s this handy chart from Wikipedia that shows of the single volume book sales by title; it’s important to recognize that, if you look at sales as a percentage of world population, Dream of the Red Chamber is by far the best-selling non-Bible book of all time, as about 10% of the the population of the world read that book (sourcefor population data):

Of course, those sales of Dream of the Red Chamber didn’t all happen in the 18th century.

Finally, sales data going back in time is pretty hard to get, and I was surprised not to see the book I thought was the best-selling of all time, Don Quixote, on the list. Then the people at HowStuffWorks did this analysis, which shows that it sold 500 million copies on its own over the course of its history.

So I’m going with that one. Which, if you haven’t read it, is amazing and easily stands the test of the 400+ years since it was published.