Iceland: Where one in 10 people will publish a book | Hacker News Reader

Iceland: Where one in 10 people will publish a book

bbc.co.uk

64 pointsjamesbritt15 comments

Be warned...this is from BBC News Magazine, which IIRC, is BBC-Lite, and sometimes publishes some fluffy but boneheaded things. Case in point, not a single statistic or data source is cited here...it's just "One in 10 Icelanders will publish one." in one of the early paragraphs...I guess since that's the title, that makes it a fact?

I found a 2008 Guardian story that cites this statistic and sources it to "Recent research":

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/oct/03/1

Doing some more Googling, I found this NPR story from Dec 2012:

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/25/167537939/literary-iceland-rev...

No source cited, but I assume it comes from the "Iceland Publishers Association", who is quoted in the lead. And the statistic is different:

> Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world, with five titles published for every 1,000 Icelanders.

So, more like 1 in 200, according to NPR, which likely got that number from a publishers' association, a group that has an incentive to promote such a statistic.

If you take 5 books per 1000 people over 20 years, that's 100 books per 1000 people. Of course, many of the same writers are on their 2nd+ novels so 1 in 10 seems unlikely, but I could see 1 in 20 people having a book published in their lifetime if everyone keeps publishing at the same rate they did in 2007

I read that as "One in 10" as within their lifetime and the NPR stat as per year, but they're both pretty ambiguous.

I presume they are sourcing their statistics from here: http://utgafuskra.is/statistics.jsp?lang=1

About 5 per 1,000 in a given year seems roughly correct. I don't know how you would calculate the figure for publications in a lifetime, especially since I presume many authors write multiple books in their lifetime.

If you're curious how other countries fare in books published per capita, I took some data and made a sortable table here: http://lukezapart.com/books_adjusted.html

Sources:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per...

[2] http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm

This data is per year?

It does show that Iceland is an outlier, but only because they publish so few books that every additional one really changes the numbers.

Also, can you add a graph (just of the frequency column)?

Complete and utter undocumented nonsense from an untrustworthy source.

Very true. I live in Iceland and, while we do publish lots of books, it is not even close to one in ten. It is much closer to 1 in 100 maybe.

Technically every university graduate produces thesis, those are published and stored in university library. So for many countries this rate is more like 5 in 10.

For Master's and Doctorate programs, sure, but not for undergraduates. What country has half of its populace graduate from an advanced degree program?

It's pretty common in Europe to write a bachelor's thesis as the capstone of an undergraduate degree. They're not always considered formally published, though (may vary by country).

In Australia, an Honours degree is technically an undergraduate degree, but a dissertation will nevertheless be "published" and kept in a university library.

Poland (and probably a lot of other European countries as well).

That's plumbing for you...

Plumbing?

BTW. I now realised I misread the parent poster. It's not true that more than 50% Poles have an advanced degree, what I meant was that more than 50% of people with a degree get an advanced degree.

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