Hi All,
Tim Spalding wrote:
" Google recently calculated that, in the history of the world, 129,864,880 books have been published. It's a rough estimate, but the right order of magnitude. (See http://bit.ly/aTLeS4)"
I wouldn't go so far as to buy into that number from Google. Their methodology is the most important part of how they arrived at their number. The method is described as: "We collect metadata from many providers . . . We then further analyze these records to reduce the level of duplication within each provider, bringing us down to close to 600 million records. Does this mean that there are 600 million unique books in the world? Hardly. There is still a lot of duplication within a single provider ..."
The error here is to equate the existing number of books (tomes, titles, whatever you wish to call it) with the existing number of bibliographic records. Sort of like basing an estimate of the number of people on the planet with the number of birth records. (Using the idea of "issue" here in a naturalistic sense as well as librarianishly.) Those number are not identical.
I've got no argument with the idea that storage is cheap, just with the question of how much needs to be stored.
Daniel
--
Daniel CannCasciato
Head of Cataloging
Central Washington University Brooks Library
400 E. University Way
Ellensburg, WA 98926-7548
dcc_at_cwu.edu
Received on Fri Aug 06 2010 - 17:49:49 EDT