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'Confessions' is e-book of the year

22.12.11 | Philip Jones and Philip Stone

The Friday Project's Confessions of a GP has been crowned the top-selling UK e-book of the year, according to FutureBook's weighted digital bestsellers chart.

The Benjamin Daniels hit that has been in and around the the weekly chart for much of the year has sold just 8,500 copies in UK in print, but has been a runaway success as a download, with more than 100,000 editions sold. It beats self-published bestseller The Basement by Stephen Leather and the Swedish sensation Stieg Larsson's first novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to the coveted top spot.

Larsson and Leather dominate the top 10 with five books between them. David Nicholls' One Day, a print and film success over the year, comes in at fifth, ahead of the next two Millennium titles, with A Game of Thrones, Room and The Hanging Shed making up the remainder of the top 10.

Despite having no titles in the top 10, Transworld is the most successful publisher in the top 50 with five titles, though among the big groups the spoils are won by Hachette, which has 11 titles in the list compared with Random's nine.

The chart is dominated by fiction, and in particular adventure/thriller novels. There are 30 such books in the digital top 50 compared with just 12 in the print equivalent. In non-fiction the highest charting book is Life and Laughing by Michael McIntyre, which at 16 is 22 places ahead of the next contender, Madeleine by Kate McCann.

The average selling price of the top 50 on Amazon was just £3.50, with 10 available for less than £1. In the print chart, the equivalent price was £6.60 with just one book (The Official Highway Code) retailing at under £4.

The FutureBook e-bestseller list is compiled by The Bookseller and uses a points-based system based on e-tailer chart positions and estimated e-tailer market shares.

Top 10

1 Confessions of a GP Benjamin Daniels (The Friday Project)

2 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson (Quercus)

3 The Basement Stephen Leather (AmazonEncore)

4 Hard Landing Stephen Leather (Hodder)

5 One Day David Nicholls (Hodder)

6 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest Stieg Larsson (Quercus)

7 The Girl Who Played with Fire Stieg Larsson (Quercus)

8 A Game of Thrones George R R Martin (HarperVoyager)

9 Room Emma Donoghue (Picador)

10 The Hanging Shed Gordon Ferris (Corvus)

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