Books of the world, stand up and be counted All 129,864,880 of you. (2010)

None 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.

Or decryption:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku

Wow 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.

> 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

> 30m are either pre-reading age or nonliterate

That's an incredibly large number of illiterates. Am surprised ...

As someone who has subscribed to Bowker’s Books in Print data for the last four years, I’d take any stats based on their data with a huge grain of salt. Bowker does issue ISBNs (and the BiP data has tens of millions of them), but they do very little validation, with their data largely input by publishers often long after the ISBN has been issued and with varying standards. For example, their attempt to identify overarching “works” (i.e. The Fellowship of the Ring as a literary work vs its various editions and reprintings) across ISBNs is unusably inaccurate, even for mainstream published titles.

Also as the article mentions, ISBNs are issued for all sorts of things most people would not consider a “book”, like journals (the kind you write in, not the academic kind), coloring books, sales displays, maps, bulk lots of books for schools, box sets, reprints of Wikipedia, calendars, etc and these are not always particularly well distinguished in their data because it’s seemingly up to the publisher to categorize it correctly, and some fly-by-night Wikipedia article reseller is just not going to put in accurate data.

Maybe Bowker has data they don’t include in BiP that would make their stats believable…but I kind of doubt it. LoC seems more reliable, but their corpus is (intentionally) much smaller and more focused, and generally the books libraries care about doesn’t 100% overlap with “all things published that most people would consider a book” since that’s not their purpose. OpenLibrary is doing good work in this space, but it’s still kinda early and struggles with data quality. It does ultimately depend how you on how you define a “book”, but for my money I’d say your numbers are low, though you’re spot on that only a very small fraction of those get widely read.

Off-by-magnitude error. 300m readers / 300k books is 1,000 readers per book, not 100.

(Assuming readers are allocated evenly and each person buys one book/year, both of which are ... unlikely.)

But this is how long-tail distributions are formed. Poisson distribution, power functions, Zipf's law, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, this is true

It’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!