[Foundation-l] How many books are there in the world?

[Ray Saintonge]

phoebe ayers wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Well, one of the things it reveals is the difficulty of answering this
>> question and I hope that it has some relation to Wikimedia projects;
>> in particular, I didn't know that multiple books (entirely unrelated
>> books) have shared ISBNs. So, if nothing else, it might impact...
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISBN
>>     
> AFAIK, this is a fairly uncommon problem; I've never run across it in
> 6+ years of working with lots of books & library catalogs every day.
> What is a much, much, much bigger problem is the issue of serials
> holdings: "serials" are normally taken to be things like magazines and
> journals, but in library land also might refer to, say, book series,
> or government reports that are published with serial numbers. All
> sorts of stuff, in other words, and it's cataloged and referred to in
> all sorts of ways, which makes it tough for people looking for good
> unique identifiers (or trying to figure out what counts as "a book").
>   
>> And I also thought that Google's attempt to catologue all books was
>> parallel to our goal of... well, I'm not sure that we ever say we're
>> attempting to catalogue ALL knowledge... but we seem to be making a
>> decent fist of it so far.
>>     
> It's certainly related to recent thoughts about a bibliographic wiki;
> obviously relevant to wikibooks; and it's interesting to think about
> scale, which is something that's been on my mind lately. I don't know
> how much effort Google made to get records from national libraries in
> remote reaches of the world, but I'd imagine that there is still a big
> chunk of stuff missing from this count that's not in OCLC etc.
> Nonetheless I think posts like this help delineate the general scale
> of the information universe that we are trying to usefully capture. I
> don't have any idea how those 130M books might map onto topics, for
> instance, but I'm guessing our 15M articles don't quite cover it yet.
>   

And to think that by the year 1500 only 65,000 incunabula had been 
published.

One can think of "books", but I don't think that that is a useful 
standard unit.  Too many less-book-savvy people get caught up in the 
notion of books as monographs.  Perhaps what is needed is a new unit of 
knowledge that is less misleading. Serials do not promise any unity of 
subject. Simply listing them is no help to finding out what may be 
useful in them.  How would we deal with problems like that of the 14th 
edition of the Britannica where later printings were significantly 
different from late printings.  Some pamphlets are not even part of 
serials.  I have a lovely one published by the US Army Field Office in 
North Africa telling the soldiers how they should behave in France.

Scaling needs to be built in at an early stage. We need to be able to do 
something entirely different from what Google and for-profit industry 
can do, instead of trying to compete head-on. How is volunteer power 
best directed?

Ray