What We Mean by Business Books and Why the Category No Longer Explains Much

RBC published its “Must Read” ranking of the most in-demand business books, based on revenue data from Chitai-Gorod and LitRes.¹ I opened the top ten and fairly quickly found myself with an odd impression: there were hardly any books about business in it.

RBC’s top 10 business books for July 2026:

1. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (AST).
2. George S. Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon (Eksmo / AST / Azbooka).
3. Mikhail Khazin, The Last Crisis of Capitalism: Ideas of Modern Economics (RIPOL).
4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Azbooka).
5. Maria Kornilova, Smeshariki: The Story of a Cult Universe (BOMBORA).
6. Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (RIPOL).
7. Robert Cialdini, Influence (BOMBORA).
8. Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, The 12 Week Year (MIF).
9. Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (AST).
10. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (Azbooka).

If the top ten tells us almost nothing about actually running a business, why do we call it a ranking of business books?

RBC explains that the list includes books on “personal effectiveness, finance, negotiation, management, and success stories.” In other words, we are no longer really talking about books about business. We are talking about a fairly broad range of practical nonfiction aimed at the kind of reader the market considers business-minded.

Formally, RBC is not wrong. The American Book Industry Study Group, for example, also defines Business & Economics quite broadly in its Book Industry Standards and Communications, or BISAC, classification: alongside management, marketing, and corporate finance, the category also includes motivational books and personal success. At the same time, American publishers treat Self-Help as a separate major category, covering subjects such as communication and social skills, creativity, memory improvement, inspirational stories, and personal growth.

I am not interested in arguing over whether the books in RBC’s ranking can or cannot be called business books. Kahneman, for example, can naturally be marketed to a business audience. The more interesting question is what we lose when we put all these books on the same shelf. How useful is a category that can contain Kahneman, a project management textbook, a personal finance book, and a motivational title at the same time?

In the Russian book market, business books have become a marketing meta-category. It brings together at least four very different kinds of titles:

• books that are actually about business — management, strategy, marketing, finance, operations, entrepreneurship;
• economics and behavioral science;
• careers and professional effectiveness;
• motivational self-help and popular psychology.

For publishers, this kind of classification affects which books are treated as competitors, how series are built, where a book is shelved, which categories are compared with one another and, ultimately, which products get commissioned. An overly broad classification eventually becomes an overly broad product strategy.

But perhaps this is simply a Russian peculiarity?

The BISAC system is used not only to describe a book’s subject matter, but also to let publishers indicate to retailers where they expect the book to be sold. So let us look at how the original publishers classify some of the books from RBC’s ranking.²

In the American classification, too, the business segment ends up containing cognitive psychology, personal finance, macroeconomics, and philosophy.

So the problem is not that someone is putting books on the wrong shelf. The problem is that the business-books category itself has become too broad to explain very much. It brings together books with different subject matter, different reader needs, and different reasons for purchase — from running a company to personal effectiveness and motivation.

It is more useful to think of business books not as a genre, but as a description of an audience. These are books for readers who want to work better, make better decisions, earn more, and manage themselves and other people more effectively. Under that definition, seeing Kahneman, Hill, Cialdini, and a management textbook next to one another no longer seems particularly strange.

For a publisher, however, using such a meta-category as a unit of analysis hides meaningful differences between segments. Books on management, popular psychology, personal finance, and motivational self-help may have different competitors, life cycles, price points, audiences, and sales dynamics. Put them all together and you can get a neat number for the so-called business-books market, while learning almost nothing about what is actually happening inside it.

For me, the question of what counts as a business book ultimately becomes a question about the quality of analysis. A category is useful for as long as it helps us see differences. Once it starts hiding them, it stops being an analytical tool.