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A bestseller is a book that is included on a list of top-selling or frequently-borrowed titles, normally based on publishing industry and book trade figures and library circulation statistics; such lists may be published by newspapers, magazines, or book store chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and specialties (number one best selling new novel, nonfiction book, cookbook, etc.). ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list is one of the best-known bestseller lists for the US. This list tracks national and independent book stores, as well as sales from major Internet retailers such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Other well-known lists are published by ''Publishers Weekly'', ''USA Today'' and the ''Washington Post''. In everyday use, the term ''bestseller'' is not usually associated with a specified level of sales, and may be used very loosely indeed in publishers' publicity. Books of superior academic value or literary merit tend not to be bestsellers, although there are exceptions. Lists simply give the highest-selling titles in the category over the stated period. Some books have sold many more copies than current "bestsellers", but over a long period of time. Blockbusters for films and chart-toppers in recorded music are similar terms, although, in film and music, these measures generally are related to industry sales figures for attendance, requests, broadcast plays, or units sold. Particularly in the case of novels, a large budget and a chain of literary agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, retailers, librarians, and marketing efforts are involved in "making" bestsellers, that is, trying to increase sales. Steinberg defined a bestseller as a book for which demand, within a short time of that book's initial publication, vastly exceeds what is then considered to be big sales.〔Steinberg, S. H. ''Five Hundred Years of Printing''. 1955.〕〔P. N. Furbank. "The Twentieth-Century Bestseller". In Boris Ford (ed.). ''The Pelican Guide to English Literature''. Volume 7: "The Modern Age". Penguin Books. 1961. Page 429.〕〔Alternative definitions are offered by Mott, Hart and Escarpit: See Greenspan and Rose, ''Book History'', Pennsylvania State University, Press, 2000, ISBN 0 271 02050 4, vol 3, (p 288 ).〕 ==Early best sellers== The term "Best seller" is first known to have been recorded in print in 1889 in the Kansas City, Missouri, newspaper ''The Kansas Times & Star'',〔"best, a. and adv." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Onlin December 12, 2007.〕 but the phenomenon of immediate popularity goes back to the early days of mass production of printed books. For earlier books, when the maximum number of copies that would be printed was relatively small, a count of editions is the best way to assess sales. Since effective copyright was slow to take hold, many editions were pirated well into the period of the Enlightenment, and without effective royalty systems in place, authors often saw little, if any, of the revenues for their popular works. The earliest highly popular books were nearly all religious, but the Bible, as a large book, remained expensive until the nineteenth century. This tended to keep the numbers printed and sold, low. Unlike today, it was important for a book to be short to be a bestseller, or it would be too expensive to reach a large audience. Very short works such as ''Ars moriendi'', the ''Biblia pauperum'', and versions of the ''Apocalypse'' were published as cheap block-books in large numbers of different editions in several languages in the fifteenth century. These were probably affordable items for most of the minority of literate members of the population. In 16th and 17th century England ''Pilgrim's Progress'' (1678) and abridged versions of ''Foxe's Book of Martyrs'' were the most broadly read books. ''Robinson Crusoe'' (1719) and ''The Adventures of Roderick Random'' (1748) were early eighteenth century short novels with very large publication numbers, as well as gaining international success..〔For details of editions, see individual articles (in most cases)〕 ''Tristram Shandy'', a novel by Laurence Sterne, became a "cult" object in England and throughout Europe, with important cultural consequences among those who could afford to purchase books during the era of its publication. The same could be said of the works of Voltaire, particularly his comedic and philosophically satirical novel, ''Candide'', which, according to recent research, sold more than 20,000 copies in its first month alone in 1759. Likewise, fellow French Enlightenment author Rousseau, especially his ''Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse'' (1761) and of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel, ''Die Leiden des jungen Werther'' (''The Sorrows of Young Werther'') (1774). As with some modern bestsellers, ''Werther'' spawned what today would be called a spin-off industry with items such as ''Werther eau de cologne'' and porcelain puppets depicting the main characters, being sold in large numbers.〔Hoffmeister, Gerhart. ("Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther)" ). ''The Literary Encyclopedia''. 17 June 2004. The Literary Dictionary Company. Retrieved 17 March 2006〕 By the time of Byron and Sir Walter Scott, effective copyright laws existed, at least in England, and many authors depended heavily on their income from their large royalties. America remained a zone of piracy until the mid-nineteenth century, a fact of which Charles Dickens and Mark Twain bitterly complained. By the middle of the 19th century, a situation akin to modern publication had emerged, where most bestsellers were written for a popular taste and are now almost entirely forgotten, with odd exceptions such as ''East Lynne'' (remembered only for the line "Gone, gone, and never called me mother!"), the wildly popular ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'', and Sherlock Holmes. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bestseller」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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