This, of course, is a somewhat unusual sort of market size item but it is an actual estimate produced by Google as part of its overall effort to try to digitize every book in existence. For details about how this count was done, what was included and what was not, check the link below to a blog post by a Google engineer involved in the project.
Geographic reference: World
Year: 2010, as of August 5th
Market size: 129,864,880 books
Source: “All the Books in the World,” LOCUS, September 2010, page 11.
Original source: Google. For details, here is a link to a blog post explaining the estimate.
It’s so dark at the end of the aisle…Kinda spooky 🙂
Spooky indeed!
I guess it would have been a good idea to have a nice, bright, shiny light at the end of that tunnel of books…
Late but not too late I hope. This one should be mirror-posted on Dwarf Planet Press!
You’d be surprsied, perhaps, at how often a comment will appear on these market size posts that is months after the fact. I suspect that reads come upon them as a result of searches run and not becuase they follow the blog in any regular way. It isn’t really the sort of blog you’d… follow as the topic is all over the place.
So, never too late!