3 ms·
Look at the Wikipedia page for best-selling authors, not best-selling books. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors https://en.m.
by jononomo 3y ago
Look at the Wikipedia page for best-selling authors, not best-selling books.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction...
- dredmorbius 3y agoAh, thanks, though that has some notable omissions. There's the note: Authors such as Jane Austen, Miguel de Cervantes, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Rick Riordan, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Higgins, Isaac Asimov and Leon Uris have not been included in the table because no exact figures could be found. Mao also seems to be omitted. Certainty is a chimera.
- jononomo 3y agoMao deserves to be omitted. As for the others, they may be well known names, but in comparison to Agatha Christie they're off by a billion copies. They'd be lucky to compete with Danielle Steele.
- dredmorbius 3y agoMao deserves to be omitted. On what basis, if you don't mind?
- jononomo 3y agoI guess I don’t think people were honestly buying and reading Mao’s pamphlet at the rate of billions. If Elon Musk printed 10 billion copies of some pamphlet he wrote and mailed a copy to every person in the world, that wouldn’t make him the best-selling author of all time. People actually read Agatha Christie novels. Agatha Christie’s novels aren’t “great literature”. Great literature does not get read by every third person in Earth. Tolkien has only sold 200 million copies, for instance — one tenth the numbers that Agatha Christie put up. Anyone can enjoy an Agatha Christie novel. I suppose Shakespeare counts as “great literature” (maybe the greatest?) but he had a head start on Agatha Christie by a few hundred years and is taught in practically high school and college in the world (and I would bet that Shakespeare is not read as much as he is sold). People don’t buy Agatha Christie novels just to display in their bookcase. Having said all that, and having read a ton of Agatha Christie novels as a kid, I guess I’m still surprised at how monumentally popular she was. Apparently she sells particularly well in French because Poirot is a popular character with French-speaking people.
- dredmorbius 3y agoFair enough. What of the religious tracts (Bible, Qu'ran, Book of Mormon)?
- jononomo 3y agoWell, I suppose the God is the best-selling author of all time, given that he is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, and the Author of Authors.
- dredmorbius 3y agoIn the beginning was the Word ... Though also: of the making of books there is no end. In seriousness, however, I had in mind the ... less than fully-voluntary publication and distribution of such works, as compared with commercial publications for which, presumably, there is some general demand amongst the population. Then there's the realisation that some EULA from Facebook or TikTok is probably the most-published text in all history.
- jononomo 3y agoWell, I'm a theist and I buy the "in the beginning was the Word" idea 100%. It is the truest statement that can be expressed in human language. In my view the "hard problem of consciousness" that Sam Harris keeps referring to is in fact "the hard problem for materialism". And I don't doubt that the Bible is the most-published book of all time. The Bible is one of the few books that a person may easily own two dozen copies of over a lifetime. And people do actually read the Bible. In fact, if you're unfamiliar with the Bible that a great many references in other great literature will be lost on you. It is a truly foundational text. As for EULAs, they don't count because no one reads them.
- dredmorbius 3y agoGeneral agreement, particularly on that last point.