So Many Books

Writers, publishers and bookstores are alarmed about the demise of the book. They worry that television, Internet surfing, online gaming and social networking will crowd out books and reading. Yet, the facts do not support such fears.

Neither reading nor publishing is in decline. In a book titled So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid provides some enlightening statistics. When the Gutenberg press appeared in 1450, publishers launched approximately 100 new titles that year. In 1500, about 250 new titles appeared. By 1950, 250,000 new titles appeared. By the year 2,000, the number of new book titles broke the 1,000,000 mark. Measured by the number of new titles per year, book publishing is thriving.

The dismay in the publishing world actually comes from uncertainty over profits. The profitability of the various forms of publishing – hardbacks, paperbacks, print-on-demand books, e-books –is in doubt. Similarly, there are questions about where we will buy books and how we will read them. Will we buy physical books in bookstores or download digital books to our cell phones? No one knows for sure, but in the long term, it doesn’t matter much.

Short term, chaos will dominate publishing. The market will test dozens of emerging publishing models, most of which will fail. A few of those models, however, will become wildly successful. Longer term, publishers, writers and booksellers will adapt to the new business models, and the number of book titles published each year will continue to grow.