So Many Books...

Is the pile of unread books next to your chair getting smaller? With hot weather upon us, are you afraid you'll run out of summer reading? Do you fear you're reading books faster than publishers can issue new ones?

If so, you can probably relax. According to R. R. Bowker, the company that publishes Books in Print and issues ISBN's, a total of 411,422 new titles and editions were published in this country in 2007. That number included a sizable increase in "non-traditional titles" published through new technologies such as print-on-demand. The total number represented a 39% increase over the previous year, with the largest percentage gains coming in fiction and literature titles, and the largest decrease in business and personal finance.

Last year's new publications brings the total number of titles in print in this country to 670 million billion zillion. Or something like that.