The Project Gutenberg FAQ - R-18

R.18. What are the most popular books?

We very rarely do statistics, but on one occasion in late 1999 when we did, we found the top author searches to be:

  1. shakespeare
  2. poe
  3. doyle
  4. melville
  5. dante
  6. joyce
  7. shaw
  8. christie
  9. conrad
  10. porter
  11. verne
  12. hemingway
  13. darwin
  14. miller
  15. woolf
  16. zola
  17. king
  18. eliot
  19. churchill
  20. smith
  21. twain

and the top individual books searched for to the point of downloading were:

  1. Lady Susan, by Jane Austen
  2. 1st PG Collection of Edgar Allan Poe
  3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
  4. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
  5. A Christmas Carol, by Dickens
  6. The King James Bible
  7. Twelve Stories and a Dream, by H.G. Wells
  8. Stories by Modern American Authors
  9. Lock and Key Library, Magic & Real Detectives
  10. [Hans Christian] Andersen's Fairy Tales
  11. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving

These numbers vary a lot. When a movie based on a classic is released, downloads of that eBook go through the roof!

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