129 million booksAs of Sunday, 1 August 2010, Google says there are 129,864,880 books in the world. Boy, is that mind blowing, not to mention humbling. Talk about too little time.
In the story, Books of the world, stand up and be counted!, software engineer, Leonid Taycher, says, ‘Well, it all depends on what exactly you mean by a “book.” We’re not going to count what library scientists call “works,” those elusive "distinct intellectual or artistic creations.” It makes sense to consider all editions of “Hamlet” separately, as we would like to distinguish between -- and scan -- books containing, for example, different forewords and commentaries.”
So how did Google come up with the number? They considered ISBN’s to be an unreliable guide. For one, ISBNs only came into existence in the 60s (even I have several books without those) and were widely adopted only a decade later, and that, too, in the Western world. Many books not meant for commercial distribution, and from other parts of the world, do not bother with it. The story says, ‘... they have been used in nonstandard ways. They have sometimes been assigned to multiple books: we’ve seen anywhere from two to 1,500 books assigned the same ISBN. They are also often assigned to things other than books.’
Collecting data
Anyway, to get to the point, Google collected data from over 150 sources like libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers, to obtain over one billion raw unique data, analysed it for duplication and arrived at a number around 600 million.
Then using further analysis of redundancies and duplication -- sometimes the same book had more than one publisher, or were published under several titles, or even libraries holding multiple copies of the same book, all with unique records -- The number was whittled down to 210 million.
Then, the story continues, ‘We still have to exclude non-books such as microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million), t-shirts with ISBNs (about one thousand), turkey probes (1, added to a library catalog as an April Fools joke), and other items for which we receive catalog entries.’ So counting only products between two covers, Google arrived at 146 million.
Then removing duplicates found as a result of numbering the same publication differently (like series and government documents) the final number arrived at (as of Sunday, 1 August) was 129, 864, 880 and counting! So now we can plan our reading.
Google blogspot
