I heard somewhere that the New York times intentionally leaves the Bible off of their best seller list because if they didn’t, it would always be number one. Has anyone else heard this?
Yep. And I believe it, too, even though I can’t find a cite for it. It’s #1, 6, and 7 on E-bookMall’s Bestsellers List.
http://www.ebookmall.com/best-sellers/top-100-betsellers.htm
If the King James Version can do that well all by itself, imagine how many Bibles of all types are sold. King James is my favorite, but I’m surprised that it is the one that sells the best.
I’m sorry, I’m going to need a cite before I believe this one.
After a little poking on Amazon, the highest-ranking Bible I found was the King James Study Bible published by Thomas Nelson, sales rank 9,281. That’s a long way from dominating the bestseller lists.
I don’t think it’s useful to extrapolate from Ebooks, due to the minimal competition in that medium.
The NY Times Best Seller list doesn’t include school textbooks either. And there are probably a lot of 4th grade math books sold in the U.S., just as an example.
My guess would be that the reason you don’t see “The Bible” on any bestseller lists would be that, since the original texts are public domain, there are so many various editions, versions, and translations on sale from various different publishers that no one publication sells enough copies to be considered a bestseller.
I always believed it was, historically, the book which has sold the greatest number of copies.
But it is not the best selling in the sense of always reaching the weekly / monthly targets necessary to maintain it on the top of a best-selling list.
According to the Guiness Book of Records:
“Since 1976, combined global sales of Today’s English Version (Good News) New Testament and Bible (which is copyrighted by the bible societies) have exceeded 111.3 million copies. Apart from the King James version (averaging some 13 million copies printed annually) there are at least 14 other copyrights on other versions of the Bible.”
What I would like to know is where are all the previous copies going to?
I was presented with a bible when I was 5 and still have it, in its nice cover & box. Why would I need to buy another?
Surely christians can’t be that careless as to lose / destroy 13 million bibles a year that then need replaced?
Yeah, if nothing else, the sheer volume of Bibles out there would dampen the continuing market.
Hotels 
Well, but think about this–almost every American household has one or more Bibles. Ours has five, and I’m an atheist and my husband is agnostic. : ) 85%of Americans identify as Christians, and I think it’s a safe bet that each Christian (on average) owns at least one Bible.
Is there any other book that almost everyone owns? Finnegan’s Wake? The Bridges of Madison County? The Joy of Sex?
I own two copies of the Bible and one of the Greek New Testament, and I have never considered getting any of those books. I think that there are probably a lot of people (like me) who own very few books, and own at least one Bible. And anyway, there are plenty of people who are willing to give you a Bible for free—how many books can you make that claim about?
Well, the second-best selling book of all time is reportedly Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, better know as the Little Red Book. And since I don’t know anyone who admits to owning a copy I’d have to say no, there is no other book which almost everyone owns.
I have a copy.
Remember, these lists are really just marketing tools. My understanding is that best seller lists regularly omit older titles because they would skew the results. I don’t think there is any doubt that the Bible would be the best-selling book in any given year, and, perhaps, in any given month, probably followed by the dictionary.
The same thing is true in music. I recall reading some time ago that the Beatles’ “White Album” and Meatloaf’s “Bat out of Hell” (?!)would regularly appear in an unbiased list of the top 50 albums being sold in any given week.
Well, just to screw with the distribution ratios a bit, I do own a copy of the Little Red Book, but I don’t have a Bible. I do have a Qu’ran, though – but that was thrust into my hands at a convention at the beginning of this month, so it doesn’t really count. (And that’s the book that would probably be up there as #3 – does anyone have an actual list of these bestsellers, or are we all just talking through our hats?)
To Truth Seeker’s point: there’s no the bible, just as there’s no the dictionary – that’s (one reason) why they don’t get ranked on bestseller lists. As others have pointed out, there are literally thousands of different editions of different translations of biblical texts in print just in the USA. (And almost as many different dictionaries, too.) If there were just one of each, that would be ranked higher.
A few years ago, there was great surprise (possibly feigned) when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (in a new, revised edition) was published and immediately became a major bestseller. Since it was the only available edition of that (quite popular) book, I wasn’t surprised at all.
My impression is that another factor here is that bibles are an example of a text that can readily utilise the advantages of the format. After all, many printed bibles come with apparatus like concordances and cross-references, all of which lend themselves to electronic improvement. Users are also less likely to be using it in a read-from-cover-to-cover fashion, so it suffers less from the obvious disadvantages of an ebook.
Together with the fact that they’re generated and published by newspapers; a listing that remained the same week after week would hardly be newsworthy.
While no Maoist, I hereby readily admit to owning a copy (along with at least half-a-dozen Bibles). I’ve no idea how many copies are in circulation, but I did notice an oddity while visiting China recently: it’s a normal sight to see secondhand copies on sale in antique markets, but these are invariably in English, i.e. they’re not examples of what had actually been distributed locally. One suspects there’s a factory somewhere churning out slightly distressed copies of it entirely to feed tourist demand for Maoist chic. (There’s no need to go to China if you want a copy for reading or reference, since it’s easy enough to find old copies in the West.)
On the subject of the second-best selling book, it’s a commonplace to note that virtually every home in, say, Victorian England would have a Bible and it’s then often claimed that if they had another book in the house that’d be … Well, that’s the thing, nobody ever seems to come up with the same title. Candidates I’ve seen the claim made about include Smiles’ Self-Help and Whiston’s translation of Josephus.
Here http://www.ipl.org/ref/QUE/FARQ/bestsellerFARQ.html is a list, although it’s not clear how authoritative it is. It gives the no. 3 spot to the American Spelling Book by Noah Webster, and this makes me think that it may relate to US bestsellers rather than world bestsellers. The US is a large market, I know, but a book called American Spelling Book must be pretty well unsaleable outside the US, and that must affect worldwide sales figures.
On the other had, the Little Red Book as the second-best selling book of all time in the US?? Strikes me as improbable.
Speaking of the 19th century, the second most common book published in the US in that era was Webster’s Spelling Book. But like Bibles, it had lots of different editions with lots of variation in text. And also like Bibles, lots of different people published it.
This is the US candidate suggested by Jonathan Green in Chasing The Sun (“This spelling book would be one of the greatest publishing success stories of the century, going on to be one of the bestselling, if not the best-selling work in America, rivelled only by the Bible.”) However, he doesn’t give a particular cite for it sales relative to anything else.