Amazon Best Books 2017
(Amazon Images)

It’s almost the end of the year, and if you still haven’t finished that pile of best beach books from the summer, you might want to transition to the next list. Amazon released it’s Best Books of 2017 on Wednesday and its got hundreds of selections across a number of different categories.

Amazon selected David Grann’s nonfiction “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” the best book of the year. It tops the annual Top 100 list as compiled by editors at the Seattle-based e-commerce giant.

Amazon says its editors read “hundreds of thousands of pages throughout the year” and selected best books every month before settling on their year-end favorites.

“In a year when there were many strong contenders for best of the year, David Grann’s book offered readers something exceptional,” Sarah Harrison Smith, editorial director of Books and Kindle at Amazon.com, said in a news release. “‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ tells the largely unknown true story of big oil and serial murder in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s. It’s meticulously researched and shines an important light on what is at once an unsurprising and yet unbelievable chapter in American history.”

Top 20 lists are compiled for other categories in print and Kindle, including arts and photography, children’s books, biographies and memoirs, cookbooks, mysteries and thrillers, graphic novels and more.

Here are some interesting stats, as shared by Amazon:

  • The authors of the Top 10 books come from six different countries: the United StatesSwedenIrelandPakistanAustralia and Israel.
  • Through the end of October 2017, Kindle customers across the globe read over 91 million pages from the Top 10 book selections.
  • According to Amazon Charts, on average, Kindle readers of “Sourdough: A Novel” read it in half the time of other bestselling titles.
  • It’s been seven years since a nonfiction book was selected as the Best Book of the Year. The last time was in 2010 when the editors selected “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot.
  • Number of space exploration-related books in the top 100 and children’s categories: five.
Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.