Populating the World with Books
Image from here
According to Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, 10,000 to 15,000 titles were published between 1450 and 1500, with an average print run of 500 copies. By 1962, 250,000 titles were being published each year. This represents a growth rate five times more rapid than that of population. Since television (1950) world population has grown 1.6 percent a year. The number of book titles has grown by an average of 2.8 percent a year. The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds. The first book to sell a million copies was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind…
Given that books will soon be unleashed from the printed page, this little explosion’s gonna look pretty pint sized.
August 31st, 2006 at 9:34 AM
“Unleashed from the printed page”? Seems like you can’t wait for the end of the book. Strange coming from a bibliophile.
September 4th, 2006 at 5:36 PM
It does, doesn’t it. Which wasn’t my intent Peter. Thanks for questioning this shoddy post.
More accurately:
With all this scanning going on, the move from cellulous to silicon will make it that much easier for readers to access content, and that much cheaper for writers to make it accessible. If more information and with it more accurate, credible, useful knowledge is a good thing, and I think on balance despite the weeding required, it is, then I’d say this ‘unleashing’ business is positive; both for the increased understanding it encourages, and for the trees it saves.
As for content that has enduring value, my hope is that there will always be someone around willing to present it in a form whose properties I can admire and treasure.