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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I imagine that everything worth reading is available on Amazon and rated in Goodreads.

Then you should broaden your imagination.

Amazon and Goodreads have barely a fraction of one percent of the books that were published. And that's just in English.

It's like saying "Anything worth watching is on streaming," even though less than 5% of the world's video content ever made the translation from film to VHS to DVD to streaming. Or paper to records to tape to CD to streaming.

There's a whole vast world of content out there beyond the internet. Once you discover this, it's like taking a pill in The Matrix.

(My metaphor might be off there, as I've never seen The Matrix, but from what I understand from other people's conversations, that should work.)

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I understand your metaphor in the sense that The Matrix is a scifi adaptation of the allegory of the cave. The concept that commercial/online bookstores are where items worth finding will be found is like thinking the shadows of the cave are the only thing worth seeing. You are correct, there is so much content there be found, which isn't limited/controlled by what the big market values.

Additionally those are very good points about English and streaming. There are books out there which are not translated and not digitized, which are absolutely worth reading, and will not be found anywhere besides private collections, used bookstores, flea markets, estate sales. Some of these books were originally purchased long ago and/or far away, just because they are not popular enough to be easily found does not mean they are not worh finding.

A friend of my dad is a professional book hound, and he says it amuses him when he sees others who can’t understand what to do with a book that doesn’t have an isbn.

When my wife and I wanted to catalog our modest home library (~1500 books) we were stunned when we discovered that the vast majority of web-based cataloging software assumes that all books have an ISBN. (Or did in 2015 or so). Thankfully LibraryThing does not make that assumption, and is great.

It was only standardized in 1970 and is only “required” if you want to sell through bookstore channels - many printed items aren’t.

Where are you getting your count of books available on Amazon?

I'd be curious how this compares with LibGen / ZLibrary (about 4--5 million titles).

The number of books published annually is somewhere between one million and ten million, depending on how they're counted. Self-published? ebooks? Audiobooks? Etc.

I'm aware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604033

Keep in mind that a largish municipal library is on the order of 250-500k items.

The Library of Congress includes ~40 million catalogued books, of which ~360k circulate annually.

Again, the question is what Amazon offers.

> Amazon and Goodreads have barely a fraction of one percent of the books that were published. And that's just in English.

Source?

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