Facts about books

From 1450 to 1500, between 10,00 to 15,000 titles were published, with an average print run of 500 copies.

By 1962, 250,000 titles were being published each year; this implies a growth rate five times more rapid than that of population.

Since the development of television (defined as 1950), world population has grown 1.6 percent a year. The number of book titles has grown by an average of 2.8 percent a year.

The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds.

From Gabriel Zaid’s fun, new So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance.

By the way, the first book to sell a million copies was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.