Raw Numbers Geekery!

Thanks to Paperback Writer, where I saw this link.

Bookwire has a table of U.S. Trade Book Production (i.e., books meant to be sold in stores, not including the various education markets), showing that title count has jumped by about 33% since 1993.

This is why people in the business perennially say that there are too many books being published -- of course, what they generally mean is that other people are publishing too many books, so our own, clearly superior, books are not getting the attention they need and deserve.

PW also linked to a similar table of all book production (trade, elhi, primary and secondary, etc.), which covers a slightly different period. The difference is stunning; for 2001, the last year both charts are final, there were 23,265 trade books and 141,703 total books. I suspect Bookwire is using a restrictive definition of "trade" here (probably excluding the Christian Booksellers of America, which is a large distribution channel of its own), but that's still a huge discrepancy. Education publishing makes up a lot of the difference, but I'd thought it was only two to three times as big as trade publishing, and that would only get us up to about 100,000 titles at most.

There are a lot of books out there. The next time I hear someone whining that the evil forces of publishing are keeping them from getting published, I'll be able to point to the 141,703 arguments against that.