MDI Comment: This article shows that interest in the Quran remains quite significant, despite the fact that Muslims are a global minority overall. The issue to consider is not whether enough people have access to the Quran, but whether enough people truly understand it.
The most popular book of all time isn’t Harry Potter
by Ollie McAteer
Article originally published in the Metro.co.uk, 15 Jul 2015
The Koran is the most popular book of all time.
The religious text has been translated into 50 different languages, has nearly 400 editions and more than three billion copies have been printed.
The King James Bible is a close runner up, with 2.5 billion copies to its name.
In third place is Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
Harry Potter (the entire series, which you could say is kind of cheating) makes it into fifth place, while wildcard The Very Hungry Caterpillar slides into the list among the weighty tomes with 30m copies sold.
The list is ranked by lovereading.com and takes into account the number of editions, translations and copies sold.
Most popular books of all time
- The Koran – three billion copies sold
- The King James Bible – 2.5bn
- Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong – 800m
- Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes – 500m
- Harry Potter series, JK Rowling – 450m
- A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – 200m
- The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien – 150m
- Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – 140m
- Alice In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – 100m
- Dream Of The Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin – 100m
- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie – 100m
- The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein – 100m
- She: A History Of Adventure, H.Rider Haggard – 83m
- The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis – 85m
- The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown – 80m
- The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger – 65m
- The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle – 60m
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne, 60m
- Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson – 50m
- Watership Down, Richard Adams – 50m
- Odyssey, Homer – 45m
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle – 30m
- To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee – 30m
- Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell – 30m
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell – 25m
- The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald – 25m
- The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – 20m
- Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson – 20m
- Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen – 20m
- Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe – 9m
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