Book printing and publish isone the oldest industriesin the world , which may lead you to wonder just how many books have existed in history . evidently , we do n’t know the precise identification number , but we can use some math and statistics to make develop guesses .
In recent retentivity , the al-Qur’an publishing industry has been monumental , rake in an average ofabout $ 25 billion per yearand impression over800 million theme - bound copiesin the United States . Modern applied science like tocopherol - readers and audiobooks have transition issue into the digital historic period and increased the volume of subject matter that can be put out , using fewer naked materials .
However , the most crucial technical advancement for book publishing came in around 1440 , in the human body of theGutenburg publish press . This allowed script to be stack - produced , rather than painstakingly written out by deal . The printing press accelerate book publishing in Europe from just a few thousand existing titlesto trillion , contributing to increase literacy .
Skip path ahead to 2010 , andGoogle ran a projectto enumeration every account book they could find on Earth , coming up with 129,864,880 unique championship in the cognitive operation . That ’s a monolithic number , but it still does n’t account for the millions more which have for sure been lost to account . Indexed books get rarer as the catalog reaches back in metre . Google also cite that they by choice excluded serialized flesh content and titles that only appeared in audio bod .
Their information was based on titles that had received anInternational Standard Book Number(ISBN ) . The ISBN scheme wasestablished in 1970as a mean for government activity to identify book titles , so an unknown number of pre-1970 employment have not been index . ego - print print booksare not command to be registeredinto the system unless the author plans to sell them on Amazon or through a bookshop . ( Getting an ISBN for a ego - published Es - book is optional . ) Generally , if the same deed of conveyance is usable as an einsteinium - book , audiobook , paper-back book and a hardback , it will haveseparate ISBNsfor each format . Google say they tried to remove duplicate book from its count .
UNESCO estimates that2.2 millionnew titles are added to the shelf globally each year . If we assume that 26.4 million young titles have been added in the last 12 years since Google ’s approximation of 129,864,880 in 2010 , we can add those numbers together for an estimate of 156,264,880 titles in 2022 . This does not include e - books , audiobooks nor books without an ISBN , which includes many self - release Word . The actual number of Christian Bible in the world would be much higher if we pick out those into consideration .
