How many books are there in the world?

September 8, 2009 9:38 PM

How many books are there in the world?

Reading about the Google Books Search Settlement, I have vecome curious the number of books in the world. I don't mean the number of actual book-like objects, but the number of titles or editions. Or maybe not all editions; only those that have different texts. How many different files would Google Book Print or the Gutenberg Archive have to have before we say they are complete?

John Orwant sounds like he is joking when he says they "numbered precisely 168,178,719 when we counted them last Friday".

According to Eric Kansa, "US Census reports 2.334 M books published in the U.S. between 1880-1998, WordCat lists 23 million books"

Counting all editions in all languages in all countries throughout history, how many books? And how do you arrive at the figure?

posted by kandinski to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Best answer: Orwant gets metadata feeds from a number of sources and he's probably not joking - the complete list compiled from every book index Google can get is probably that number.
posted by GuyZero at 9:50 PM on September 8, 2009

Most books in the western world get ISBN numbers.
posted by jedrek at 2:48 AM on September 9, 2009

Response by poster: GuyZero: deadpan right, thanks.
posted by kandinski at 4:58 AM on September 9, 2009

Just for curiosity's sake: what is the number of actual book-like objects?
posted by Iridic at 8:37 AM on September 9, 2009

Note that per Orwants' other comments in his LanguageLog comment, there are probably a lot of double-counted (or more) books in that number. Whether it makes a measurable difference is hard to say.
posted by GuyZero at 9:38 AM on September 9, 2009

One stat of interest:
3000 books are published per day in the United States alone.

better get caught up on your reading.
posted by CodeMonkey at 10:57 AM on September 9, 2009 [1 favorite]