FYI: The US and Britain speak the same language, so why aren't they reading the same books?

For all their historic, linguistic and political closeness, the United States and Britain are poles apart when it comes to their taste in literature. Whatever best-seller lists one chooses to consult they point to a stark cultural divide. A quick look at the top sellers on Amazon shows cookbooks and celebrity biographies leading the pack in Britain while Americans are more taken with tomes that promise to help them do everything from lose weight to find new meaning in life.

So profound are the differences that pundits have seized on book sales as a barometer of national character or sentiment. The 'self-help' genre, made up of works with impossibly optimistic titles such as Happier than God or A New Earth, has virtually taken over US publishing, with total sales quadrupling in the past decade to more than US$2 billion - and this in an environment in which book sales as a whole are slipping.

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