The most popular book of all time isn’t Harry Potter

Turns out the Koran is top of the pops (Getty)

It’s not exactly a ripping yarn, but the Koran is the most popular book of all time. 

The religious text has been translated into 50 different languages, has nearly 400 editions and more than three billion copies have been printed.

The King James Bible is a close runner up, with 2.5 billion copies to its name.

In third place is Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a legend in its lifetime

Harry Potter (the entire series, which you could say is kind of cheating) makes it into fifth place, while wildcard The Very Hungry Caterpillar slid into the list among the weighty tomes with 30m copies sold.

The list is ranked by lovereading.com and takes into account the number of editions, translations and copies sold.

Most popular books of all time

1. The Koran – three billion copies sold
2. The King James Bible – 2.5bn 
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong – 800m
4. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes – 500m 
5. Harry Potter series, JK Rowling – 450m
6. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – 200m 
7. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien – 150m
8. Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – 140m
9. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – 100m
10. Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin – 100m
11. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie – 100m
12. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein – 100m
13. She: A History Of Adventure, H.Rider Haggard – 83m
14. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis, 85m
15. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown – 80m
16. The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger – 65m
17. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle – 60m
18. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne, 60m
19. Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson – 50m
20. Watership Down, Richard Adams – 50m
21. Odyssey, Homer – 45m
22. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle – 30m
23. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee – 30m
24. Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell – 30m
25. Nineteen Eight-Four, George Orwell – 25m
26. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald – 25m
27. The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – 20m
28. Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson – 20m
29. Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austin – 20m
30. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe – 9m

Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2015/07/15/the-most-popular-book-of-all-time-isnt-harry-potter-5297319/#ixzz3fzx3NeYR