This topic was seleted because of my interest in literature and having seen an increase of people writing for money instead of artistic vision. Though I'm a firm believer that books should be written as an art instead of for a paycheck, I thought it would be interesting to gather information about the best-selling books of all time.
If I were to do this project again, I would expand it to more creative mediums such as music and film. I think the comparisons that would be able to be discovered there would be interesting, and it opens the potential for some really interesting data visualizations.
There weren't any specific questions I wanted to answer, just lots of small ones. For example, "What percentage of the best-selling books of all time are written in languages other than English?", "Are there any genres that tend to sell more than others?", and so on.
Data was collected by accessing Wikipedia's list of all books which have sold more than 10 copies. Any missing information was gathered where necessary from miscellaneous sources, mostly Amazon listings, Barnes & Noble pages, or simple google searches. You can find all sources used here.
Sadly, the results were as I expected. A large number of the books on the list are in English (though the number of other languages surprised me, especially smaller langauges like Gujarati), most released within the last 100 years, around 200-450 pages, with genres like Fantasy and Historical Fiction.
One thing did surprise me, however, and that was the number of Children's books on the list. Though thinking back on it, that is to be expected. As they are short, often cheap, and people go through them quickly.
Another thing that surprised me was the range between number of copies sold between the best selling books. I expected a linear progression, with each book selling slightly more than the last. However, most were between 10-25 million. Then slightly less were between 25-75 million, then only six books that had sold more than 100 million.
