Amazon top selling book lists for 2009 and 2010
18/12/2010 Guardian Bestselling green books of the decade: part two by Damian Carrington.Sir David Attenborough. The BBC’s natural history spin-off books dominate
Amazon’s top 10 environment books of the decade. I blogged a
couple of weeks ago about the UK’s bestselling green books of 2010 the last
decade, based on Nielsen bookscan data, which had James Lovelock, Tim Smit,
Christopher Booker and Al Gore dominating the list.
I have now got a different take from Amazon, who define their environment and
ecology category a little differently. It includes some different names but
still has plenty of books by climate sceptics.
Here are the lists, first for the last decade:
Amazon UK’s top 10 environment & ecology books 2000-10:
1. Planet Earth: As You’ve Never Seen It Before
Alastair Fothergill
2. British Isles: A Natural History
Alan Titchmarsh
3. Life
Michael Gunton and Martha Holmes
4. The Real Global Warming Disaster
Christopher Booker and Richard North
5. The Revenge of Gaia
James Lovelock
6. It’s Not Easy Being Green
Dick Strawbridge
7. An Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore
8. Planet Earth: The Photographs
Alastair Fothergill
9. An Appeal to Reason
Nigel Lawson
10. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
Jared Diamond
It’s basically a BBC whitewash, with numbers one, two, three, six and eight all
BBC books to accompany high-profile television series. Nigel Lawson’s sceptical
book makes an appearance at nine.
Now, for this year’s list:
Amazon UK’s top 10 environment & ecology books for 2010:
1. How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything
Mike Berners-Lee
2. The Hockey Stick Illusion
A. W. Montford
3. The Real Global Warming Disaster
Christopher Booker and Richard North
4. Cradle to Cradle
Michael Braungart
5. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
James Lovelock
6. Born Wild: One Man’s Passion for Lions
Tony Fitzjohn
7. The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living
Mark Boyle
8. Small Is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher
9. Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
10. When a Billion Chinese Jump
Jonathan Watts
Three have Guardian connections: we are partly serialising How Bad Are Bananas.
We were the first to write about the Moneyless Man (if you’re wondering, he’s
giving the sales money away) and the book by our Asia environment correspondent,
Jonathan Watts, is at 10. The classics at four, eight and nine show their
enduring appeal.
Overall I am struck by how well the sceptic books sell, given that their premise
is a fringe one: every nation on Earth just signed up to doing something to
tackle climate change in CancĂşn. Are conspiracy tales simply a more gripping
read?
Go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2010/dec/17/bestselling-green-books-decade-2?intcmp=122