Most read books in the world

Friends,

Recently, the Geneva-based think tank World Economic Forum published the list of most read books in the world (quoting figures published by another source, it seems).

What is most interesting to note that The Holy Bible, the sacred book for Christianity, is the most widely read book in the world, with 3,900 million (or 3.9 billion) copies sold in the past 50 years.

Come to think of it, I think that the main reason for this may be due to the fact that:

• Christianity is the largest religion in the world - the data published by Pew Research Center in 2011 showed that there are 2.2 billion followers of Christianity.
• Most Bibles are present in almost all hotel rooms - whether people  actually reads them, that is a different matter

Being a Muslim, this information of course struck me in the head, in the sense that I am interested to know how many Muslims actually read The Holy Quran?

And come to think of it, why is the Quran not in the ranking list? There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, the second largest religion after Christianity, and the Quran is still not part of the ranking. That seems a bit ... odd.

Is it because Muslims are not fond of reading the Quran, or is it because the Quran was discounted from the rank or is it because of something else? 

Just a thought.

I am somewhat concerned on the ranking [I am in no way disputing them, but just have a tinge of doubt], but then again, the information presented below came from an established body of World Economic Forum.

Below are the list of books that are widely read (as appeared in the World Economic Forum Facebook page). On cursory glance, it seems that the rank was formed through the number of copies sold in the past 50 years.

Rank	Book	Number of copies sold in the past 50 years
1	The Holy Bible	3,900 million
2	Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung	820 million
3	Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling	400 million
4	The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien	103 million
5	The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho	65 million
6	The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown	57 million
7	The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meter	43 million
8	Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell	33 million
9	Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill	30 million
10	The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank	27 million

Source: World Economic Forum

The table above is nicely translated to the info-graphic shown below:

(Source: The World Economic Forum)