How Many Books Are There? (2025)

In 2010, Google tried to definitively count how many books are in the world, and counted 129,864,880 books. Modern humans are not educated; they are schooled to serve the economy.

How Many Books Are There? (1)

But including self-published books (about half of books published today), 3-4 million new books are published per year, so the number of books today, round off and figure 180 million books intended to be read so far. We may have reached peak book, which is one metric that could be used to mark ‘peak everything’ (others being peak energy production per capita and peak human population, which have not yet been reached).

How Many Books Are There? (2)

Reading all 180 million books at one/second would take 5.7 years — easy if you are an AI server farm.

If you read 50 books per year (two weeks off for sick time) for fifty years, you can read 2,500 books (avid readers may read 150 books/year or 7,500 in 50 years). So, 72,000 readers could read 180 million books in a lifetime.

Figure 84,000 words/book and 500 words per page (168 pages/book) and figure 3.6 million readers (there are about 52 million people with PhDs) read all books in one year (preparing information packages for posterity is time critical), and that each takes notes on the 50 books they read and boil the content of the books down to one page (average) of the most important information posterity may value if any (the 3,600,000 pages of notes could be boiled down by humans or AI, if still available, to eliminate duplication and low-value content).

But 3.6 million pages would be 22,500 books equivalent. None of the best points from 50 randomly selected books may be selected for preservation and much of what is selected would be duplicated on other pages. From the many duplications of points to ponder, the expression judged best would be selected.

As almost no one could read 22,500 books in a lifetime (450 books/year for 50 years), the set of core books that 80% of people could be expected to read in a lifetime needs to reflect human limitations, e.g. a core library of 500 books as common knowledge.

If printed, Wikipedia would be more than 7,500 volumes of 168 pages each, but omitting information that posterity would not find of value (e.g. celebrity bios) for the contingency of restart after crashing would require fewer words. Understanding the planet and how to live properly with it long term is needed to persist (avoid extinction). All knowledge may be of value, but some information/knowledge/sapience is more valuable than other bits and bytes.

Since Gutenberg started printing books on a press in 1443 for money, the number of books printed per year has grown, as have journals, articles, and Medium… Substack posts less than book length (usually).

Figure a future where everyone has special interests and is an expert in one or more fields, but 50 books meet their idiosyncratic specialist needs. To be mostly on the same page, humanity’s information package needs to be boiled down to about 500 core books of shared information/knowledge/sapience the average reader could read (along with other readings, e.g. novels and classics).

In the US today, the average teenager reads 15 minutes/day and those over 75 years old read 40 minutes/day. In a pre-TV/video or post-screen world, assume the average adult could read 60 minutes/day average. Figure the upper four-fifths of readers can read/consider the content of a 500-word page in two minutes, or 30 pages/day. To read 500 160-page core books (information packages) could be done in 7–8 years by 80% of people, or in fewer years by motivated autodidacts.

How Many Books Are There? (3)

Thoreau found that while living at Walden Pond he only had to work six weeks a year, and as a migrant farmworker only working intermittently in the summer, I made enough money to be entirely self-supporting at 18, go to a junior college for three years, read at a university library for 6 years (9 months/year as a non-student), and pay for 3 years at a state land-grant university while living in a box I built on the back of a pickup truck I moved every week or two to not be too noticeable (during the 1973 oil embargo, I read about angry motorists fuming in gas lines, but never needed to buy gas, so never actually saw anything). I verified Thoreau’s claim to only need to work (at other than being an autodidact which involved no work) for six weeks/year. H.D. Thoreau was a poor student, enriched beyond measure.

“Thought makes the whole dignity [potential value to posterity] of man; therefore endeavor to think well [tell better stories], that is the only morality.” — Blaise Pascal

How Many Books Are There? (2025)

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