structural:reformatting
Census of copies

Arthur Koestler described De revolutionibus as " The Book That Nobody Read " saying the book "was and is an all-time worst seller", despite the fact that it was reprinted four times. Owen Gingerich, an eminent astronomer and historian of science who has written on both Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, disproved this after a 35-year project to examine every surviving copy of the first two editions. Gingerich showed that nearly all the leading mathematicians and astronomers of the time owned and read the book; however, his analysis of the marginalia shows that almost all of them ignored the cosmology at the beginning of the book and were only interested in Copernicus' new equant -free models of planetary motion in the later chapters. Also, Nicolaus Reimers in 1587 translated the book into German.

Gingerich's efforts and conclusions are recounted in The Book Nobody Read, published in 2004 by Walker & Co. His census included 276 copies of the first edition (by comparison, there are 228 extant copies of Shakespeare 's First Folio) and 325 copies of the second. The research behind this book earned its author the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981. Due largely to Gingerich's scholarship, De revolutionibus has been researched and catalogued better than any other first-edition historic text except for the original Gutenberg Bible. One of the copies now resides at the Archives of the University of Santo Tomas in the Miguel de Benavides Library. In January 2017, a second-edition copy was stolen as part of a heist of rare books from Heathrow Airport and remains unrecovered.