If you truly can’t get enough of “best of 2010” lists, here is what you could call the mother of all best photobooks 2010 lists, featuring book selected by 27 different contributors, an impressively diverse group featuring photographers, writers, bloggers, publishers. It’s interesting to see that the books most frequently selected were in fact picked by a rather small fraction of people. The book topping the list, Broken Manual by Alec Soth, was picked by 6 contributors (or 22%). (more)

I suppose you could read all kinds of things into this. What I find striking is the similarity with the German beer market: Everybody (Germans) love(s) photobooks (beer), but the most popular book (beer) occupies only slight more than 20% of the market. Needless to say, if you’ve ever been to Germany and happen to love beer, you know that that’s great for consumers (but not so much for the producers, see, for example, this story): You have so much to choose from, and the quality is so high. That’s exactly the situation of the photobook market right now, where there is no shortage of publishers, and the selection of books produced in 2010 alone is mind blowing.