How many books exist in the world?

(1) On January 7, 2012 at 2:19 pm Cziesler [0] said:

This answer is clearly a massive underestimate. The Library of Congress is not the only book owner in the country.

According to a NYT Article in 2005 (which sadly I can't find the original of) http://askville.amazon.com/books-sold-year/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=39298 there were 3.1 billion books sold in the US in 2005 alone. Let's assume that the US buys say a third of the world's book, which would mean that there were about 10 billion books a year being produced. Now, the tricky thing is to estimate the trajectory of book growth over the 500 years since Mr Gutenberg did his clever thing with movable type in 1455?

Let's assume (for fun) that the growth of books has been exponential. That is for every hundred years the number of books produced has increased by a factor of 10. This doesn't seem too unreasonable, it would lead to the following growth of world book production:

Year #Books (millions)

1500 0.1

1600 1

1700 10

1800 100

1900 1,000

2000 10,000

If I then sum up all the books produced between 1455 and 2011 I get the figure of about 565 billion books which doesn't seem to be too bad an estimate.

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