3 ms·
#IDidTheMath There are about 129,864,880 books in the entire world. The median length for all books is about 68000 words. It would roughly translate into 250 m
by basitmakine 8y ago
#IDidTheMath
There are about 129,864,880 books in the entire world. The median length for all books is about 68000 words. It would roughly translate into 250 manuscript pages in average.
If you must know, it would take 247 years for one scanner to do its magic and digitalize all the books ever written.
Ps: Pretty sure I screwed something along the way, would appreciate if you don't roast me for my math :v
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoOr one year with 247 scanners. :-D
- soheil 8y agoThrow a mere 1000 scanners at it in a warehouse and you'll be done in 3 months. ps. amount of information in the world doubles roughly every few years, I wonder how that reflects on the number of books.
- jacquesm 8y agoQuality of information is a very important metric. Books have editors, proofreaders, fact-checkers. Online stuff not so much. As the value of a bit goes down so does the value of a collection of those bits.
- jimmaswell 8y agoThere are more than enough junk books out there too for sure.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoThere is also an argument to made that editors etc serve as gatekeepers to keep out "the wrong kind of people," which frequently correlates to the wrong gender, the wrong race, the wrong religion, the wrong social class and so on. For some people, freedom to try to express themselves and/or freedom to hear others try to express themselves is far more valuable than whether or not the writing is grammatically correct and typo-free.
- rtkwe 8y agoFortunately most of those new books will be created using digital software so preserving them is much easier theoretically. Just have to convince the publisher to give them up.
- siruncledrew 8y agoThat's Google Book's estimate as of 2010, so there are more now: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-...
- dredmorbius 8y agoThe rate of publishing as recorded by Bowker (issuers of ISBNs) is about 300,000 "traditional" books (publishing houses), and about 1 - 1.5 million if you include "nontraditional" (self-published / print-on-demand) books. The 300k figure has been very consistent since the 1950s, and is even down somewhat from the 1970s / 1980s IIRC (US LoC annual report data). So the total is only up by at most about 10-15m books, and if you're looking at traditional publishing, about 3m. The quality of books published is another question.