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Counting the World's Books
The Google Books blog has an explanation of how they attempt to answer a difficult but commonly asked question: how many different books are there? Various cataloging systems are fraught with duplicates and input errors, and only encompass a fraction of the total distinct titles. They also vary widely by region, and they haven't been around nearly as long as humanity has been writing books. "When evaluating record similarity, not all attributes are created equal. For example, when two records contain the same ISBN this is a very strong (but not absolute) signal that they describe the same book, but if they contain different ISBNs, then they definitely describe different books. We trust OCLC and LCCN number similarity slightly less, both because of the inconsistencies noted above and because these numbers do not have checksums, so catalogers have a tendency to mistype them." After refining the data as much as they could, they estimated there are 129,864,880 different books in the world.
Look at textbooks - new editions that are almost indistinguishable from the previous editions have new ISBNs. Do we count every single one as a different book?
I'm very suspicious about their numerical precision. IF it's an estimate, then they are saying it's 129,864,880 +/- 10. That is, they are pretty sure there aren't 129,864,980 books. I think they should make their estimate something like "we think there are about 130,000,000" or whatever accuracy they actually believe.
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How about the books that people write and spread around to friends or books published by small in-house printshops, often as promotional material? Books written before ISBN that are still in libraries but no longer published (Bodoni's type specimens come to mind, though it looks like some of these are indeed catalogued by WorldCat)? Books that were printed years ago that we know we lost to the ages (the lost Gospel of Barnabas--not the forged Gospel of Barnabas--comes to mind). What about the books that we never knew existed?
This estimate isn't bad for published works, but it does not adequately answer the question posed, ``Just how many books are out there?''
Look at textbooks - new editions that are almost indistinguishable from the previous editions have new ISBNs. Do we count every single one as a different book?
From TFS : if they contain different ISBNs, then they definitely describe different books
If they're using this method, GP's point is valid. The books are not really new books, they're essentially the same as previous editions but have different ISBNs. In essence, these new editions with new ISBNs are being counted twice (or more) for very small revisions to the same book.
Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books. I don't know know haw many Terry Pratchett has written but the number is in the dozens. There's Clarke, Heinlein, Niven... and those are just a few science fiction writers (yes, Asimov also wrote nonfiction and Pratchett is known mainly for fantasy). Serious authors write more than one book each.
So your average is a little meaningless.
No, averages are very meaningful. Extremely meaningful. They are the AVERAGE (usually the mean), which means that some values will be above, and some values will be below. The idiocy comes in when people mistakenly jump to the conclusion that just because an average exists, it means that every value must be exactly the same as the average. Or, just because you can find extreme values far away from the average that again the average is not meaningful.
If the average states that 1 in 50 people have written a book, then, by gum, it will be easy to find plenty of people who have written zero books, somewhat fewer who have written exactly one (something below 1 in 50), much fewer who have written exactly two, even fewer who have written exactly three, etc. That does not mean that example authors with hundreds of books cannot exist, it only bounds how frequent they can be.
Of the myriad of ideas that the academic community has utterly failed in educating the general public about, it's the relationship between averages and distributions. One more time: just because an average exists, it does not mean that every datum has the same value as the average. As an example, just because the average male in the US is 5' 9", it does not mean that every single male is that tall, nor that you will not find ones that are shorter, taller, or even much shorter or much taller. The tallest man (according to my 20 seconds of research through Google) was 8' 11", and the shortest was 1' 10" ... does that lessen the meaningfulness or utility of the average male height? Rather the contrary: it provides important information as to the extent of the distribution of heights.
Now, I suspect that the parent poster is trying to say that because -- by loosely founded speculation -- most authors are professional authors ("serious authors") and therefore will have more than one book to their name, the classification of people into authors and non-authors will be skewed against 1:50. I would not argue against that (in fact, I indirectly argued for it above). Nevertheless, using the utterly non-scientific sample of the books above my desk, most authors have only one book to their name, so the number isn't going to be much worse than 1:50, perhaps 1:55 or 1:60. That kind of pure, unadulterated speculation is exactly the sort I would love to see proved wrong with hard data.
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ISBNs suck as identifiers for digital books, especially digital books that are free. There are two problems.
Problem number one is that they cost money. Let's say someone writes up a really nice manual documenting some open-source software. He wants the manual to be free, just like the software. But now if he wants an ISBN, he has to pay money to get the ISBN, which means expending dollars on a book that is not going to be bringing in any dollars. The fact that ISBNs cost money is out of step with the fact that we have this thing called the World Wide Web, which is basically a huge machine for letting people do publishing without the per-copy costs that are associated with print publishing.
The other problem is that ISBNs are supposed to uniquely identify an edition of the book. This makes sense for traditional print publishing, where the economics of production forced people to make discrete editions widely spaced in time. It makes no sense for print on demand or for pure digital publishing. I've written some CC-licensed textbooks. When someone emails me to let me know about a typo or a factual error, I fix it right away in the digital version, and I usually update the print-on-demand version within about 6 months. No way am I going to assign a different ISBN every 6 months.
We can say that ISBNs are for printed books, not for ephemeral web pages, but that doesn't really work. The two overlap. My textbooks exist simultaneously as web pages, pdf files, and printed books. Amazon sells a book for the kindle using one ISBN, assigning a different ISBN to the printed version. Print-on-demand books share some characteristics with printed books (e.g., they're physical objects) and some with the web (can be updated continuously).
By the way, why do you think library catalogs don't show ISBNs? It's because ISBNs are meant as commercial tools, like the barcode on a box of cereal. If google finds ISBNs useful for other purposes than selling copies of books, it's probably because google is trying to deal with a massive number of books using a minimum amount of human labor.
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