Non-fiction books are real events, facts or stories. This is the opposite of fiction books which are stories made up by the author, and are therefore are not real. A good way to remember this is to tell yourself that the word fiction is a synonym for fake, so fiction means fake and non-fiction means not fake.

Non-fiction books can be broken up into a large list of categories. This is because anything from auto-biographies to do-it-yourself home building books are classified as non-fiction. The categories that we list on thebestbooks.org are business books and health books. According to Google Trends, these two categories are relatively equal in popularity.

Non-fiction books are less popular than fiction books, but still receive a large following, at least in the United States. The US searches "non-fiction" about 4 times as much as Canada, the second largest searcher. After that the search volume get dismal as India, Australia, and the UK are third, fourth, and fifth. The cities with the most searches are Columbus (US), Raleigh (US), St Louis (US), Reston (US), and Chicago (US).