A number of different year-end bestseller lists from around the world published recently demonstrate the wide variety of titles that become successful in different markets.

Zusak ranks in European charts
According to a Publishing Trends list that compared 2007 bestseller lists from six countries (the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Sweden), ranking books by their number of appearances in the charts, Khaled Hosseini's two books The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns were the top books of the year, with Australian author Marcus Zusak coming third with The Book Thief.

Given the international focus of the list, Publishing Trends also ranked the titles by the number of territories they had sold to: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (number eight by mentions) had sold to the largest number of territories--60; however, The Book Thief appeared more often in the international charts and has sold to 28 different territories.

Nielsen shows little cross-over between markets
Nielsen BookScan compared sales in the US, South Africa, Australia and Ireland in the week before Christmas, and found that the only title common to the pre-Christmas bestseller lists in all four countries was Guinness World Records. Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Prey, Love was the biggest seller across all territories, with just under 300,000 copies selling in the US in a week.

Most countries in the BookScan list showed a strong preference for nonfiction--only Australia had a fiction-driven list, topped by Bryce Courenay's The Persimmon Tree.

Big prices paid for collectable books
Finally, online ‘marketplace' AbeBooks, which allows sellers of new, used and collectable books to list their titles on the one website, has reported on the most expensive titles it sold in 2007.

One Australian customer paid over $10,000 for a first edition of Journal to a Voyage to New South Wales, written in 1790.

Modern classics also attracted high prices, with four-figure sums paid for rare copies of books by Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce.

And no list would be complete without a J K Rowling mention--a first edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, complete with some errors corrected in later printings, sold for $2,772.