Sunday, June 17, 2012

Top 10 Most Read Books

Top 10 Books by Jared Fanning

1. The Holy Bible
2. Quotations from Chairman Mao
3. Harry Potter
4. The Lord of the Rings
5. The Alchemist
6. The DaVinci Code
7. The Twilight Saga
8. Gone with the Wind
9. Think and Grow Rich
10. The Diary of Anne Frank

Information graphics are great additions to papers, especially ones that look this good. They can convey a massive amount of information in the briefest glance.

Here's what I mean. If you wrote The Top 10 Most Read Books as a paragraph it would begin, "The top ten most read books in the world refers to the number of books sold, not printed. The number one book is The Holy Bible which sold 3,900,000,000 copies. The number two spot is occupied by Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, selling 820,000,000." You would have to read a whole lot more before you got to "The Diary of Anne Frank is the 10th most-read book in the world having sold 27,000,000 copies." See what I mean? This could be a really long, boring paragraph, but the information graphic, using book spines as a bar chart, makes the information easily accessible and aesthetically delightful.

But, be careful, make sure your own in-text graphics are easy to read and easy to understand. There is nothing worse than a graphic filled with itty-bitty numbers that are hard to decipher.

Speaking of deciphering. Why do you think The Quotations from Chairman Mao is in the number two spot? At the other end of the graph with 27,000,000 copies sold, why do you think The Diary of Anne Frank is number ten? What do you think effects the purchase of these books?

11 comments:

  1. this blog showed me that more people care about more imagination geared things instead of serious, sad stories. The holy bible is more for growth as a person and spiritually many people use them for church and personal things e.g. reading at home . the effects to the purchase of these books are more based on interest than anything i dont think many people want to be crying and sad based on anne franks hardship the like books that make you sit on the edge of your seat without actually being there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It feels great to know that The Quotations from Chairman Mao ranked no.2 on the most sold books list. That book was so famous in the 60s to 70s in China. Because if you don't have it with you, you will be in big trouble in that era. Maybe the only exception is Chairman Mao himself. To my knowledge from the books I read, that was crazy years.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm not quite sure why "The Quotations from Chairman Mao" is number two because I have never heard of it but looking at this list of books shows that besides the bible that people would rather read fiction stories like "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" rather then stories about stuff that is apart of history like "The Diary of Anne Frank". Even though these Fiction stories are really good reads, you cant do anything with the information that you get from these stories. I think that if they found to way to may the stories that talks about history and etc. more interesting then they will probably be higher on the sold list.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I went to Catholic School. No one truly reads the whole bible.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The reason why "The Quotations from Chairman Mao" is number 2 was because he was a tyrant. Back in the day when China was still under his rule. It was mandatory that every student ranging from elementary to college level was required by law to study his so-called "wisdom". His idiotic actions eventually led to a period of 10 years of a vacuum of intellectual advancement in China. The Diary of Anne Frank, on the other hand, sold only around 27 million copies. It might be because her story was so well-known and it is public property what the German government did to Jewish people back then. The trend of purchasing a certain book has a profound effect of peoples' thinking. If everyone bought Mao's book, they would be instilled and inclined to do things a tyrant would do, and they probably would find democracy a stupid idea. But if every one bought Anne Frank's diary, we'll learn to treat every one equally by knowing her plight.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "The Quotations from Chairman Mao", my parents still have this book today, but it is just a piece of nostalgia. I can't deny at the time of 60s, 70s in China, it was mandatory to read this book. because the left deviationism wanted to control people's thought by this book. Actually, this book author is not Chairman Mao. I am not quite know about Anne Frank's diary. I think the effects of purchasing these book is up to yourself. You can learn the thought at that period and can understand why people at that time would do some things out of your understanding.

    ReplyDelete
  7. It is interesting to see the Bible is the number one book in the world because I do not believe people actually read the entire Bible front to back like they would the "Da Vinci Code". The article should be titled "The most bought books in the World" not the most read. Also three of the books up there belong in a series so that gives them more sales compared to a book not in a series like the "Diary of Anne Frank".

    ReplyDelete
  8. As a fellow Christian it was certainly a nice surprise to say the least to see the Holy Bible sitting pretty at number one. But with all seriousness I can certainly see why with lots of certitude it is holding down the number one spot regardless of knowing the fact that it sold 3,900,000,000 copies. This list seemed very accurate as a whole to me overall with the Quotations from Chairman Mao sitting at number two, Harry Potter at number three, The Lord of the Rings in the fourth hole,The Alchemist in the fifth, The DaVinci Code at number six, The Twilight Saga at number seven, Gone with the Wind gone at number eight,Think and Grow Rich for nine, and the classic The Diary of Anne Frank at number ten.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The reason why the "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung" is the number two spot is because this statistic is based on number if books printed, and while China remains under communistic rule they will be forced to read literature such as this. As far as Anne Frank being at the number ten spot that reall surprised me. Her diary,just like the bible has been printed out in sixty-seven languages. I feel that this info-graph had good intentions but has somehow been interpreted differently. There is no real effect on purchasing these books, its just a matter of preference and popularity.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I think the reason the quotations of chairman mao is number 2 is because china was under communist rule when the dictator made his book so everyone there was probably forced to buy it and read it. It also is probably and interesting historical read for younger generation chinese people to see how their ancestors had to act and think in those times. Anne frank's book is probably number 10 because reading about a young girls journey and death in the holocaust makes people really sad. They don't want to read about the suffering the jews went through in that time. Also it took several years to get the story of Anne frank published and then translated into different languages so it was probably not relevant to a lot of people in later years, plus it was a banned book in most schools.

    ReplyDelete
http://read-think-b4-u-write.blogspot.com/2012/06/top-10-most-read-books.html
read-think-b4-u-write.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-30
137522
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5Y3TMJSRCO7MHJ2GW54VRAKU53CP5EAJ
<urn:uuid:a74b4d8f-c9ba-4181-a318-33618a6f3fe7>
2017-07-22T10:50:49Z
216.58.217.65
text/html
sha1:ZY3UBCCSXZ3FF552QAEPAJVDASQE7T5R
<urn:uuid:e7940eb1-3447-4e90-841a-7ce7354590bb>
http://read-think-b4-u-write.blogspot.com/2012/06/top-10-most-read-books.html
response
<urn:uuid:42fa5499-0957-4d22-9430-b5762b545315>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-168-225.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-30
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf