At work I regularly get emails from a firm advertising document storage space. Although we don't need the service, I've never marked it as spam because they always contain a few paragraphs of information about books, paper, publishing - anything along those lines - some of which is fascinating to read.
As Kindle users, we're all well aware of how the digital publishing industry has taken off over the last few years - here's some of what today's email had to say:-
The number of books published somewhere in the world increased very slowly year by year through the first eight years of this century.
It took four years for this total to rise from 450,000 per annum in 2001 to 500,000. There were then three years of very little growth, until everything started to move. By 2008 there was a rise to 750,000 and by 2010 the total had shot up to 4,250,000.
..... for the number of new titles to rise from 450,000 to 750,000 took seven years – an average of 43,000 additional titles a year. That is a big enough leap – but to go from 750,000 to 4,250,000 in two years is incredible. Put another way, the number of books being published has risen by 1.75 million a year. If this trend were to continue the 2011 figure should come in at around 6 million new titles, and by 2020 we will be publishing over 17 million new books a year. (But) if the percentage growth were to continue at the rate of the last couple of years then the number of books published each year by 2020 will be 41,503,000,000,000.
I haven't checked the maths on that, but one thing is quite clear - I'm going to need a d*mn sight bigger Kindle!
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