Though no exact start date is known, modern book printing is over 1,000 years old. In 2010, Google Books estimated that nearly 130 million books had been published, with now over 2 million new books published each year. Such competition means only a few great reads have sold tens or hundreds of millions of copies, topping the charts as some of the bestselling books of all time.

Though there's no one source that has consistently tracked book sales over the centuries, publishing websites (such as Publishers Weekly) are able to estimate the sales of older works and track the sale of new releases much more accurately. To assemble this list of the top bestsellers ever, Business Insider excluded religious texts (such as the Bible and Quran) and only included titles with reliable data from publishing companies, news articles, and official press releases.

The books on this list cover a wide variety of genres from self-help to horror, originally published in countries all around the world and translated into dozens of languages.

View details at Business Insider

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