5 ms·
Books of the world, stand up and be counted All 129,864,880 of you. (2010)
- ant6n 2y ago[flagged]
- Bluestein 2y agoCome to think of it, probably at least twice as many by now. Even more, if growth has not been linear ...
- y4mi 2y agoas the beginning of the article says: it all depends on what qualifies as a book if you're including epub novels, that have never had a print done... then yeah, at least is gonna be the operating word, likely multiple times considering just how many fiction books are being produced on webnovel sites and then published as epubs for their fans to buy and support the author.
- LegionMammal978 2y agoIt also depends on what qualifies as 'published'. If a bot generates 100 nonsensical children's books with an LLM, lists them all on Amazon, and then takes them down a day later before anyone notices any of them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40779643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40779643), then were they ever really published?
- Bluestein 2y agoI - ignorantly - wonder what the whole point of that might be? - they cannot possibly sell that many in the intervening time ...
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- wwilim 2y agoA T-shirt that has an ISBN number assigned surely is a great conversation starter. I wonder where can I get my hands on one
- Bluestein 2y agoYour comment puts me in mind of that t-shirt way back in the day, containing encryption source code. Fun times ...
- throw0101b 2y agoOr decryption: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku
- paxys 2y agoeBooks and self publishing weren't quite as big a thing in 2010. I wonder what result a similar count would produce today, when one can "write" a book, have it published and listed for sale, and even printed on demand, all in a matter of hours.
- Bluestein 2y agoI would ballpark-estimate at least twice as many.- That said, as wisely said downthread, it depends on how one defines "published" - or, "book" even ...
- dredmorbius 2y agoBowker (the ISBN-issuing authority in the US) tracks issued ISBNs by publishing category. At last check a few years ago, this was on the order of 300k "traditional" books (that is, produced through an established publisher) and another 1--2 million or so "nontraditional" books. Latest report I can find is from 2013, now only available as an archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20150415233658/https://www.bowker.com/documents/isbn-output-report-2002-2013.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150415233658/https://www.bowke...> It's interesting to consider books published vs. total market. For the US, there is a reading population of about 300 million people (I'm presuming ~30m are either pre-reading age or nonliterate). For 300k books, that's 1,000 readers per book. (Edit: Not "100" as initially written.) The highly asymmetric long-tail dynamics of book publishing, with a small handful of titles selling 1m+ copies per year, and most having sales of far fewer (often largely library sales) becomes highly evident. The US Library of Congress also publishes new additions annually as part of the Librarian's Report to Congress: <https://www.loc.gov/static/portals/about/reports-and-budgets/documents/annual-reports/fy2023.pdf https://www.loc.gov/static/portals/about/reports-and-budgets...> (PDF) FY2023 registrations were 441,526 (pp. 84--85).
- Bluestein 2y ago> 30m are either pre-reading age or nonliterate That's an incredibly large number of illiterates. Am surprised ...
- addUrl 2y agoNow, using modern technology, they can write 7 billion books. What is their value?
- Bluestein 2y agoSadly approaches zero, am afraid.- (At least for the slop ...) PS. We need an AI book reviewer to tell the difference.-
- addUrl 2y agoUnfortunately, this is true
- vundercind 2y agoIt’s a damn good thing there’s so much very, very good pre-“AI” media that one could be entertained and engaged and educated for three lifetimes with it. And that’s just the best stuff!
- Bluestein 2y agoSigh. "Pre-slopocene" vs. "Slopocene" ...
- jl6 2y agoOf the 129,864,880 books, the article mentions 5, and I’ve read 4 of those. What a little bubble us tech people inhabit.
- Bluestein 2y agoWhat are the odds ...
- throw0101b 2y agoThere's actually a product(? service?) called "Books in Print" that lists all things currently being published: * https://www.bowker.com/books-in-print https://www.bowker.com/books-in-print
- Isamu 2y agoBooks in Print used to be a book in print. Updated yearly, I used it at the library.
- skuxxlife 2y agoWow I can only imagine how unwieldy that was to use. Was it just one big list by date published or did they did they try to order by title/author/publisher? Books in Print nowadays is tens of thousands of (mostly garbage) records monthly - I imagine the volume was a lot less back then, but still had to be a lot to sort through on paper.
- throw0101b 2y agoSeveral thousand pages over a few volumes (ISBN 978-1-63700-938-3): * https://www.greyhouse.com/Books-In-Print https://www.greyhouse.com/Books-In-Print * https://www.greyhouse.com/bowker-series https://www.greyhouse.com/bowker-series * https://www.amazon.com/Books-Print-Set-2024-25/dp/1637009380 https://www.amazon.com/Books-Print-Set-2024-25/dp/1637009380 ToC (PDF): * https://www.greyhouse.com/Media/GreyHousePublishing/samples/bip_2024_vol1_toc.pdf https://www.greyhouse.com/Media/GreyHousePublishing/samples/... Sample pages (PDF): * https://www.greyhouse.com/Media/GreyHousePublishing/samples/bip_2024_vol1_pgs.pdf https://www.greyhouse.com/Media/GreyHousePublishing/samples/...
- throw0101b 2y ago> Books in Print used to be a book in print. Still available (ISBN 978-1-63700-938-3): * https://www.greyhouse.com/Books-In-Print https://www.greyhouse.com/Books-In-Print
- HocusLocus 2y agoWell ok. A shout-out to my own 9798990595101 and its ebook buddies 9798990595118 and 9798224433186. Some stats: Copies sold: 0. Royalties $0. Family and friends: noncommittal and confused. Personal feeling of accomplishment: priceless I guess. $0.99 ebook promotions so far 2 months, 0 copies. Looking to extend the record for 2 more months with 0 more copies. On-demand technology is fun, but boring if there is no demand. Amazon "Best Sellers" rank: #6,757,387 in Books.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoIt's sold no copies, and yet the only copy I can find for sale is a used ("as new") one on AbeBooks. The plot summary does look interesting, though.
- HocusLocus 2y agoNone of those are real unless someone orders them. Lots of scalping by db nerds going on because these companies do not charge on-ramp fees for items. I priced the paperback at $15 and chose to put the price on the back cover ISBN barcode for Amazon/IngramSpark paper copies, so in every respect it is a traditional book equivalent to those in stores or in libraries, got a Lib or Congress number too and sent them one. I see AbeBooks has '2' of them with the (*101) ISBN, so that seller will order those fake-copies on Amazon and pocket the extra. But there is another network Draft2Digital who insists on No price anywhere on the book and assigning their own ISBN (the *186). They are aggressive internationally and cater to a lot of deep pocket impulse buyers (I guess the rich are like that the world over), so you can see your book 'listed' for 3x the price. Only when someone pays that price will they pay the $15 to D2D and drop ship to the customer. The no-price policy is so those people will not be annoyed to see $15 once it is in their lap.