[basitmakine]

#IDidTheMath

There are about 129,864,880 books in the entire world. The median length for all books is about 68000 words. It would roughly translate into 250 manuscript pages in average.

If you must know, it would take 247 years for one scanner to do its magic and digitalize all the books ever written.

Ps: Pretty sure I screwed something along the way, would appreciate if you don't roast me for my math :v

[TaylorAlexander]

Or one year with 247 scanners. :-D

[fredguth]

I am pretty sure it takes a long time to put a book in that device.

[jibolso]

Spot on.

[soheil]

Throw a mere 1000 scanners at it in a warehouse and you'll be done in 3 months.

ps. amount of information in the world doubles roughly every few years, I wonder how that reflects on the number of books.

[rtkwe]

Fortunately most of those new books will be created using digital software so preserving them is much easier theoretically. Just have to convince the publisher to give them up.

[jacquesm]

Quality of information is a very important metric. Books have editors, proofreaders, fact-checkers. Online stuff not so much. As the value of a bit goes down so does the value of a collection of those bits.

[siruncledrew]

That's Google Book's estimate as of 2010, so there are more now: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-...

[dredmorbius]

The rate of publishing as recorded by Bowker (issuers of ISBNs) is about 300,000 "traditional" books (publishing houses), and about 1 - 1.5 million if you include "nontraditional" (self-published / print-on-demand) books.

The 300k figure has been very consistent since the 1950s, and is even down somewhat from the 1970s / 1980s IIRC (US LoC annual report data).

So the total is only up by at most about 10-15m books, and if you're looking at traditional publishing, about 3m.

The quality of books published is another question.