An Unsettling Bestseller

Mein Kampf is rising to the top of e-book bestseller lists:

Mein Kampf hasn’t made The New York Times nonfiction chart since its U.S. release in 1939, the same year Germany invaded Poland, and its print sales have fallen steadily ever since. But with a flood of new e-book editions, Hitler’s notorious memoir just clocked a banner digital year. One 2012 English-language version is currently the number one Propaganda & Political Psychology book on Amazon. Another digital selection is a player in the Globalization category. …

The first Kindle edition of Mein Kampf surfaced in late 2008, selling for $1.60. Shortly after that, another version popped up for $1.58 and rocketed up Amazon’s Legal Thrillers chart, then suddenly vanished in March 2009, along with a slightly pricier rival version, after a blogger at CNET acknowledged its burgeoning success. At the time, Amazon did not respond to CNET, which found it “unclear who uploaded the Kindle Edition of Mein Kampf.” Nevertheless, the e-book behemoth removed the virtual versions while continuing to offer a range of cloth and paperback printings, the overwhelming majority of which sold poorly if at all.

Stephanie Butnick wonders about the sudden rise:

For one thing, it’s a lot easier to click open the Kindle version instead of whipping out a print copy of Mein Kampf on the subway.

The book is so notorious, even the most curious readers probably wouldn’t bring it to the checkout counter at Barnes and Noble. As Vocativ points out, the book’s popularity falls in line with the 50 Shades of Grey model: readers are much more likely to stealthily download the online version, just to see what’s inside.

And maybe it’s time they did. The book itself, published a decade before World War II, is frighteningly frank about Hitler’s plans. In it, Hitler details his intentions to eliminate the Jews, also suggesting the German Reich expand by taking some of Russia’s land. As Marc Tracy noted back in 2010, while the book outsold the Bible in Germany as Hitler rose to power, no one seems to have actually taken a look inside.

Jason Heller links the book’s resurgence to a new study that suggests there’s a formula for successful books:

Thankfully, literature is not a science. Yet the writing and selling of literature increasingly is. Thanks to a proliferation of analytics, it’s easier than ever for publishers to track, graph, and therefore do their desperate best to predict market trends. Judged on that cold scale of downloaded units, Mein Kampf—which has come roaring back recently thanks to a high volume of e-book sales—might now be considered a good book.

I won’t go so far as to say that reducing the richness of books to ones and zeroes, and then judging them on such a scale, is tantamount to literary eugenics. But it does raise a question about what it means for a book to be formulaic, and whether that’s a good or bad thing. Or whether those kinds of questions even mean anything anymore.