Best Selling Books in History
The Printing Press was the internet of the Middle Ages. When Gutenberg’s gears began to turn in the 1450s, knowledge stopped trickling and started flooding the world. This bar chart below, the best-selling books in history, is a testament to that tidal wave:
Religious texts (📖) raced beyond monasteries.
Political manifestos (📕) ignited revolutions.
Literary epics (📙) leapt from local folklore to treasured classics.
None of these titles would have reshaped culture at this scale without one simple innovation: the ability to copy at speed.
We have been here before, again and again. Every time we invent a faster way to capture and share information, three things happen:
1️⃣ Data explodes. From clay tablets to printed pages to cloud servers, the volume always multiplies.
2️⃣ Gatekeepers shift. Power moves from the few who own information to the many who can read it.
3️⃣ New literacies emerge. Scribes → typesetters → coders → data storytellers.
Today, we’re standing on the edge of the next Gutenberg moment. AI-generated content and real-time analytics are producing petabytes per second and, just like in the 15th century, society is scrambling to make sense of the deluge.
This is what my new book “From Chaos to Clarity” is all about. Google it and pre-order it on Amazon. It's out on 10 July.
What “printing-press moment” are you seeing in your field right now?