According to Google Books, there are 129,864,880 books in the world. Their methodology for coming up with that number is here, but I really can’t believe that they’ve been able to accurately count the number of books (not individually, but in terms of unique editions) that exist in the world. I’m sure the Vatican is hiding a bunch of volumes of work in their libraries. And what about the incredibly museum pieces in Armenia, which certainly don’t have anything close to an ISBN, but may certainly have been catalogued by a librarian at some point. 

Part of my disbelief stems from my view of the book. Quantifying how many exist means that at some time, there were no books in the world. It was long ago, of course, long before Gutenberg and his printing press, but the idea of a world without books just boggles my mind. Then, of course, I start wondering about translations and how we define a book (the skim this in their explanation, which makes sense if you’re a counter and not necessarily also a book lover) and whether we take into consideration how that definition has changed over time. And what about all the finished manuscripts, lying around and just waiting to be published or discovered? How to classify those?

What I’m saying, I guess, is that Google’s number seems both too small and illogically huge. I wish they’d said something about how many books are in your average city library, just for a sense of scope. Still, it is quite a number, even if it is incomplete (as I suspect it to be).