1- What is the number of authors who published a book (not self pub) in 1995? 2- What was the number of English-speaking readers who bought novels in 1995? 3- What is the number of English-speaking readers estimated who buy books in 2017? Do these stats even exist anywhere? If so I'm sure they are difficult to compile. Does Publisher's Weekly keep numbers like this?
I am sure they exist for 1&2; Maybe not on the internet though. Publishers weekly should have it in their archives. I am sure there are plenty of guesses for 3. This might help for a historical source also. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) monitors both the number and type of books published per country per year as an important index of standard of living and education, and of a country's self-awareness.
How many books have ever been published in all of modern history? According to Google's advanced algorithms, the answer is nearly 130 million books, or 129,864,880, to be exact. We'll admit it's practically impossible to count every book that has ever been written, but in order for Google Books to successfully catalog the world's supply of printed knowledge, the company needs an estimate of the amount of books it needs to scan. That's why Google set out on the task to do just that. In a detailed blog post, software engineer Leonid Taycher outlined just how complex counting books actually can become. The first step is defining exactly what a book is. The company decided to discount anything that wasn't an idealized bound volume:
Thanks Joe. I'm specifically interested in novels, and novelists. I have heard cited several times that one million books are published each year, over the past half decade or so. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that it was less than 100,000 in 2001-2002 but again I can't cite that source. Also there's the variable of big six(5) vs self pubs but I don't think any stats on this were kept in the pre-Amazon era. I'm trying to put together a 'formula' to explore changes in the industry but I'm not sure I can ever really get accurate numbers.
I recall seeing stats for decades. Even broken out by type. Finding them may be hard. Ask your reference librarian the question and often they perform magic and find the data. The SP number was small before amazon. The SP numbers grew fast when digital and PCs made it cheap and easy for anyone to SP. They got bigger as POD vanity presses proliferated. And they soared when amazon made digital books feasible. During that time trad pub numbers have come down some.
